Tag: Eisenhower

Green Bay’s National Rail Museum

By Joe Berk

That picture above?  It’s a Big Boy steam locomotive cockpit!  Look at all those valves!

Green Bay, Wisconsin.  Say that name, and most people think of Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers.  And why not?  It’s what the town is known for.  But I’ll let you in on a secret:  Green Bay has one of the best rail museums I’ve ever visited.  I like rail museums, and if there’s one anywhere near where I’m traveling, I’ll stop.  Susie and I wrapped up a trip to Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the National Rail Museum made our list. It’s easy to find, and Green Bay is a fun little town.

The National Rail Museum has a bunch of small items on display after entering the first building (track maintenance hand tools and the like).  Then it’s on to a hall where the big stuff is kept.  One of the first trains is General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s European train, the one he used as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II.  It’s big, it’s impressive, and it’s fit for a 5-star general.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower train. It’s dark green and it’s imposing.

The Eisenhower train was built by the British with a number of features to keep it low key (or so some of the signage said).  The name on the locomotive and the exotic paint theme indicated otherwise.

Not very subtle, I would say. General Eisenhower used this train for getting around the European Theatre of Operations.
The Eisenhower train was built by British Railways. That, my friends, is a cool logo.
A photo of General Eisenhower leaving his train.
A meeting room on the Eisenhower train.

The National Rail Museum has one of the very few surviving Big Boy locomotives.  I’ve seen three (well, actually two, but I saw one of them twice).   One was at the National Steam Locomotive Museum in Scranton, and another was parked at the Pomona Fairgrounds (it’s that one I saw twice).   The first time was when it went from Ogden, Utah, to Pomona under its own power.  It stopped in Pomona, and it was an amazing thing to see.

Big Boy No. 4017. I wish that Halloween decoration wasn’t there. I didn’t want to risk moving it.

It’s hard to put into words just how big a Big Boy is.  Photos don’t really do its size justice.

Signs at the museum told us the temperature in the engineer’s compartment was typically 93 degrees even with the windows open.
A peek into the coal tender. Big Boy locomotives consumed so much coal that a man couldn’t keep up with it, so instead of shoveling coal into the engine, the tender had a worm gear that drove it in.

A locomotive that caught my attention was the Pennsylvania Railroad’s GG-1 electric locomotive.  When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main tracks were only a half mile from my home.  We loved watching those trains scream by, always pulled by a GG-1.  They are gorgeous locomotives.

A magnificent Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 locomotive. These are beautiful machines. The GG-1 was entirely electric. They drew power from high voltage overhead wires with their pantograph.

From the engineer’s position, the view forward is through one small window.  You really can’t see much of what’s ahead.  That would make me nervous.

By the 1950s, passenger rail travel was losing favor with the American public.  Airplanes were faster, and with the advent of the Interstate Highway System, most people drove.   The railroads wanted to turn that around.  One attempt involved General Motors designing an aerodynamic locomotive and less expensive rail cars.  GM designed the “Aerotrain” drawing on their styling talents, but the effort flopped.   I’d seen pictures of that locomotive (there were only ever two made), but I’d never seen one in person until this visit.

The General Motors Aerotrain locomotive. It was a beautiful design but a commercial flop.

The Aerotrain story is a fascinating one.  This video explains it.

There are plenty of great railroad stories and more than a few great movies.  You might remember the Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor hit from the 1970s, Silver Streak.  It you ever wondered where the last car of that famed train came to rest, wonder no more.

If you haven’t seen the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder movie of the same name, you need to. You can thank me later.

I’ve been to the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, Golden Spike National Historic Park (where the Transcontinental Railroad was completed), and now, the National Rail Museum in Green Bay.    All are great stops, and all have great storyies.  I once did a story on Big Boy 4014 when it was in Pomona, California.  Gresh has a couple of rail blogs, too, including the Nevada Northern and the Cumbres and Toltec lines.  Rail stuff is cool.

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The $100 Hamburger…

The $100 hamburger:  It’s aviation slang for any hamburger that requires flying in to a local airport for a burger. I first heard the term from good buddy Margit Chiriaco Rusche when researching the story on the General Patton Memorial Museum.  You see, there’s still an airport at Chiriaco Summit, left over from General George Patton’s Desert Training Center.  Margit told me about pilots flying in for the mythical $100 hamburger at the Chiriaco Summit Café, and I knew I had to have one as soon as she mentioned it.  The Café doesn’t actually charge a hundred bucks (it was only $15.66 with a giant iced tea, fries, and a side of chili); the $100 figure pertains to what it would cost a pilot to fly your own plane to Chiriaco Summit, enjoy the General Patton Burger, and fly out.

Even though bloggers like Gresh and me are rolling in dough, we don’t have our own airplanes.  But we have the next best thing.  Gresh has his Kawasaki Z1 900, and I have my Royal Enfield Interceptor.

Good buddy Marty (a dude with whom I’ve been riding for more than 20 years) told me he needed to get out for a ride and I suggested the Patton Museum.  It’s a 250-mile round trip for us, and the trip (along with the General Patton Burger, which is what you see in the big photo above) would be just what the doctor ordered.  I’d have my own hundred dollar burger, and at a pretty good price, too.  Two tanks of gas (one to get there and one to get home) set me back $16, and it was $18 (including tip) for the General Patton Burger.  I had my hundred dollar burger at a steep discount.  And it was great.

I’ll confess…it had been a while since I rode the Enfield.  In fact, it’s been a while since I’d been on any ride.  I didn’t sleep too much the night before (pre-ride jitters, I guess) and I was up early.   I pushed the Enfield out to the curb and my riding amigos showed up a short time later.  There would be four of us on this ride (me, Marty, and good buddies Joe and Doug).   Marty’s a BMW guy; Joe and Doug both ride Triumph Tigers.

As motorcycle rides go, we had great weather and a boring road.  It was 125 miles on the 210 and 10 freeways to get to the Patton Museum and the same distance back.   Oh, I know, there were other roads and we could have diverted through Joshua Tree National Park, but like I said, I hadn’t ridden in a while and boring roads were what I wanted.

The Patton Museum was a hoot, as it always is.  I had my super fast 28mm Nikon lens (which is ideal for a lot of things), and I shot more than a few photos that day.  You can have a lot of fun with a camera, a fast lens, a motorcycle, and good friends.  A fast 28mm lens is good for indoor available light (no flash) photography, and I grabbed several photos inside the Patton Museum.

It was a bit strange looking at the photos of the World War II general officers, including the one immediately above.  I realized that all of us (Marty, Joe, Doug, and I) are older than any of the generals were during World War II.  War is a young man’s game, I guess.  Or maybe we’re just really old.

You can see our earlier pieces on the Patton Museum here and here.  It’s one of my favorite spots.  If you want to know more about Chiriaco Summit, the Chiriaco family, and the General Patton Memorial Museum’s origins, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Mary Gordon’s Chiriaco Summit.  It is an excellent read.

We rode the same roads home as the ride in, except it was anything but boring on the return leg.  We rode into very stiff winds through the Palm Springs corridor on the westward trek home, and the wind made for a spirited ride on my lighter, windshieldless Enfield Interceptor.  My more detailed impressions of the Enfield 650 will be a topic for a future blog, so stay tuned!

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