Six decades ago a couple of local train buffs got the idea of preserving the dwindling number of steam engines in the South on film, an endeavor that led to one of Chattanooga’s most iconic attractions.
The Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum is kicking off a year of 60th anniversary events with steam train rides, special exhibits, blacksmith demonstrations, military reenactments and a display of model trains over the next two weekends. The displays will be located in the museum’s new exhibit building, open to the public for the first time.
The celebration of the museum’s birth in 1961 is dubbed “The First 60 Years,” according to spokesperson Penelope Soule Gault, daughter of museum co-founder Robert M. Soule Jr.
“The idea was born back in the late 1950s when my father and Paul Merriman were going around the South filming steam engines as it was it approaching the end of steam engine life. They were being scrapped daily,” Gault said Friday in a phone interview.
“They were filming as much as they could, and that was when the spark happened. ‘Hey, could we save one of the beasts of steel and create a place where people could come and still see it functioning?'” she said. “Thus was birthed the idea of a railroad museum and it moved forward from there.”