SAL HWT coach 821 at the Florida RR Museum has a divided section. It was used in the Clinchfield excursion train and later at Ky Railway Museum. FRRM acquired it via a trade a couple of years ago and it is used in the Museum's excursion trains.

I rode in it behind KRM (L&N) 162 a few years ago.

-JH

The Pennsylvania RR, Baltimore & Ohio, Western Maryland, Washington, Baltimore & Annapolis, and Maryland & Pennsylvania RRs must also have had to deal with changing segregation laws when crossing state lines. At some times, Maryland and Delaware also had Jim Crow laws for public transportation. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia usually didn't. A Cumberland Valley RR train between Harrisburg, Pa. and Winchester, Va. would be another complicated trip as it ran through Maryland and West Virginia.

Midwest Railway Preservation Society in Cleveland (formerly part of Midwest Chapter NRHS), had, and I think they still have, a N&W combine with a small glass partitian section next to the baggage compartment they always called a smoking section, but I believed to be a Crow car.

I personanlly met Rosa Parks for a TV show I worked with, she had a few things to say about some of policemen antics while eating dinner...shut them up!

I read a book about a book writer gal who masqueraded as a black in the souoth to see what it was like, one black lady said .. "Nothing wrong with being black, but it sure is inconvenient!"

IIRC, TVRM has one or two exSouthern heavyweight coaches that were set up for segregated service, and the NCTM also has one. All of these were from the Southern 1200-series and began as ca1920s coaches, then were rebuilt as Jim Crow cars around 1940.

They have a partition with a swinging door between the two sections of car.

Also remember something about a Jim Crow car restored or being restored for the Smithsonian.

It's currently being restored by Wasatch Contracting in Stearns, KY inside the original backshop building of the Kentucky and Tennessee Railway. This car will eventually go to a new aferican american history museum the Smithsonian will be building around the car when it's delivered.

Theres also a Southern heavyweight Jim Crow car rotting away on a siding in Milner, KY and theres also a wooden Jim Crow car being restored by the Depot Museum group in Bowling Green, KY that got saved from a siding in Glasgow, KY.

The Shoreline Trolley Museum has a restored Atlanta car that once had segregation signs similar to New Orleans.

I asked several African-American visitors if they were offended by the signs. They all said the signs should be displayed to let the public know what life was like in the South at one time.

PSRM, Campo, CA, has an 1886 Pennsy all wood coach that was sold in 1916 to a short line in Arkansas that added a Jim Crow partition in the middle of the car. It was later sold to a short line in Texas that converted it to a combine, with the baggage section at one end, and the passenger section at the other. And a partition with a swinging door was added in the passenger section.

See http://psrm.org/roster/passenger/combine3/index.html for more details.

It has been restored, but, due to its age and fragility, it is not used on our trains.

The reactions from our black visitors cover a wide range. From, "Take it out and burn it," to "I don't want to go in and look, but I'm glad you have it so younger people will know about segregation," to "Yes, I want to take my family in there to show them what it was like when I was a kid."

One day I was talking to a multi-generation black family, and said something about segregation. A 10 or 12 year-old boy asked, "What's segregation?" I guess we have made some progress.

Actually, I started wondering about than and I don't think that ET&WNC 15 would have qualified as a Jim Crow car as there apparently weren't equal compartments and the car wasn't really built for that anyway. This link goes into more detail: http://www.cfordart.com/3-1Stemwinder1990combinestory.pdf

At the Southern Forest Heritage Museum, in Longleaf, LA we have former Fernwood, Columbia and Gulf "doodlebug" #M-4. This motor car was built in 1937 and was built with a "jim crow" configuration in that white passengers sat on leatherette seats in the front, and black passengers sat on wooden benches behind a locked gate, in the baggage section of the car. As the interior of the car was gutted years ago, and most of the original furnishings lost, it is no longer set up like that.

Still, it is an important lesson to teach to all of our visitors so we make sure that all of the riders know what the car was like in the 1930-1950 era so that they can appreciate what things are like today.

Shoreline's New Orleans trolley 850 has the sockets in the seat backs for the portable signs. Hearsay claims that their Atlanta trolley 948 had stationary signs, "Whites seat from the Front, Colored seat from the Rear". Both are double ended cars, so Front and Rear can change on different trips.

Around 10 years ago, when Steamtown was restoring a Seaboard Jim Crow combine for the Gold Coast RR Museum, we fashioned two of those triple sided signs for the two seating compartments. I don't have any photos of that to share, but I do have this exterior shot from the park's photo library of the completed car.


If I remember correctly, we took a steel billet and ground it down to the proper size and enameled it with the accurate wording for each side. I don't know if this is the way it would have been made originally. I also recall telling visitors while the restoration took place, that you could get a sense of the railroad's approach toward "separate but equal" based on the dividers. Whether they were solid walls, etched glass panels or other decorative elements, they still indicated to travelers where they were welcome and where they were not.

Dagnabbit! I thought I read every post in this thread, and only after posting the above do I find the post by wilkinsd mentioning the same car. I hope you like the photo, though.

When I was a member of Connecticut Trolley Museum in the early 1990's, their New Orleans car had the white/colored sign in a storage locker on board the car. One of the members showed it to me when I crewed the car in operations.

Here is a photo I took in September 2006:


The sign in the first compartment is seen on the far wall, right of the door, indicating this is the colored compartment. On the other side of the dividing wall is the sign indicating the white compartment.