I’ve wanted to go to the Western Railway Museum for years. They do a ton of restoration work and have various rolling stock that you have the opportunity to ride on if you visit the museum. Most recently, they bought one of the old BART cars that were recently retired and are adding it to the collection. We decided to finally go up on August 17th because they had also advertised a classic car festival in their parking lot for that day, and since we missed our local one in June, it seemed like a good opportunity to do classic cars and a railway museum! Unfortunately upon our arrival we learned that the car festival part of the day was a total bust, there were two cars. Hah! We see more than that just driving around our town on a random Saturday! But hey, there was still a railway museum.
We got a family membership because with six of us it was actually cheaper than buying train ride tickets for all of us, and we definitely wanted to do that too. The museum has a small indoor section near the admissions and gift shop area that we didn’t take a very close look at since the boys were eager to get outside to see all the trains. The first barn you get to has a bunch of old street cars and trams in it, some of which you can climb into, which was a lot of fun.
We then took a quick ride in the San Francisco Municipal Railway 178 car, now affectionately known as the “Iron Monster“.
Once we concluded that journey, we got to go on the much longer, 5-mile trip, on their Key System 187 interurban train. The cool thing about this one (aside from it being a “slinky train”) is that these cars were used from from 1939 to 1958 to go across the Bay Bridge and in East Bay streets. The Bay Bridge routes are handled by buses now, but I do kinda of long for those rail days and it was a delight to finally ride in one of them. It was also funny to ride past cow pastures and wind farms in an interurban train, quite a different life than it had during service times! And probably surprising to anyone driving down the road when one is making a crossing over active roads.
As we were leaving, someone else on at the museum saw Adam’s BART shirt and noted that one of the control panels that was unceremoniously sitting near the entrance was from the BART system, so we enjoyed looking at all those knobs and switches.
I wish we could have stayed longer, but I was conscious of not keeping everyone out too late and we needed to get lunch. Next time I think we’ll bring a picnic lunch which will give us more time to check out the extra barn tours (one of which has that BART train in it!) and also visit their switch garden where you can play with some of the railway switches, which I know the boys will LOVE (me too).