Re; this newspiece and another in Flimsies:

http://www.register-mail.com/stories/02 ... .GID.shtml


Any comments on this Hall of Fame plan? To me, it seems a shame to spend $60 million on such phoney baloney stuff when real historic sites languish in ruins, but with potential for restoration at a fraction of the money. Of course, this is just a proposal, with no real guarantee that it will ever happen.

This piece demonstrates that there is public interest in railroad history which can translate into significant financial support. It also shows that in order to be able to attract this support, railroad preservation has to be able to demonstrate its ability to effectively serve as an education institution and to serve the growing interest in heritage tourism.

As an aside, how many other attempts have there been to create "national" hall of fames? There was a still-born effort in Niles, MI which still has a billboard facing the Amtrak mainline there.

The REAL national hall of fame is located in Chicago. You can look up any railroad employee who worked after 1936:

http://www.rrb.gov/default.asp

Tom Cornillie

What about the other National Railroad Museum and Hall of Fame in Hamlet, NC?

http://www.micropublishing.com/railroad/

I smell bacon sizzling.

I think we've moved past that to "raging forest fire" stage........

From a purely investigative standpoint, I would like to know the Who, What, Why, When, or how about this project. Is there any particular group that would NOT benefit from $60 million?????

......That may be something other than bacon frying.........

I didn't see anything substantive in the original article about railroading. It sounded like a real estate development project. Hope not, but where are the railroad specifics?? What are they going to feature?

Here's a link to the Galesburg site:

http://home.gallatinriver.net/bondicorp/nrhf/index.html

Wesley

They have not updated the website for some time. It does not look nor feel like a 60 million dollar project from the website. I can think of about a hundred ways to better spend 60 million railroad related public dollars. With the hundreds of historic buildings/trains kicking around the country why build something new? I'll never understand.

I think I can predict who won't be mentioned at all in Galesburg:

Any people who worked for Electro-Motive during its seventy years in La Grange, or for any of the dozens of other railroad equipment suppliers that were based in Illinois, regardless of how much they contributed to the advancement of technology in the railroad industry.