Cheyenne-based Wasatch Railroad Contractors has just finished the restoration of Southern Railway No. 1200. This vintage heavyweight Pullman-built passenger coach served a portion of its life as a 'Jim Crow' segregated passenger car on the Southern Railway.

The car was donated to the Smithsonian Museum more than three years ago by Pete Clawson, long time railroad historian and businessman. Restored by Wasatch at their Stearns, KY location, the car will be hauled by semi-truck starting Monday, November 11, 2013 to Washington D.C.

Once in Washington D.C. The car will be lowered nearly 60 feet into the basement levels of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum will then be finished around the car over the next two years. The new museum is slated to open in late 2015, early 2016.

The Smithsonian is holding an open house for those that wish to see the car before it is transported next week. The car can be seen at the Big South Fork Scenic Railway car shop on Saturday and Sunday, November 9-10, 2013, from 9:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.

For more information about the open house, feel free to contact me direct.

info@wrrc.us or 307-286-2833

John E. Rimmasch

Wonderful job on the restoration! Beautiful car.

Nicely done, John! On the Central of Georgia this would be called a "partitioned coach". Not sure if the nomenclature was the same on Southern or not, but these were a fairly common way of segregating within a single car. Many people tend to automatically think of a combine with a center baggage compartment as the standard segregated car in the south, but partitioned coaches such as No. 1200 were probably more common than the "Jim Crow" combine, especially on the bigger roads. There is an unrestored original example here in Albany (CofGa 514) and an unrestored modernized example at Southeastern Railway Museum (CofGa 527).

Since I know someone will be asking, I'll go ahead and pose the question here:

How did you arrive at the green color used on the car? In all the research I did while trying to come up with a "correct" green for a SR baggage car, I never came across this shade of green used on a coach except in the 2-tone Crescent cars and on the passenger locomotives. Since this is a "modernized" car with sealed windows, it would seem that the darker olive pseudo "Pullman" green used by SR would have been more appropriate. I have to presume that the Smithsonian researchers directed the use of this color, so I'm really curious if you know their sources. Since I can't come up for the open house, do you have any interior shots you can share?

I'll go ahead and say it first, even though I know it isn't possible due to the length of the building in question: Crying shame this couldn't be coupled to 1401...

John -

Beautiful restoration! Well done! It gives me hope that someday, the Smithsonian might actually find and display a small plain black Consolidation as a more representative example of steam power to go with Southern 1401, which is certainly atypical of the way most locomotives appeared in regular service.

Les

Hmmm....and Southern #630 will be in Oneida, TN on Sunday. That isn't far from Stearns, KY, is it? (grin) For those folks who are interested, the City of Oneida and Scott County will be hosting "BSF Vintage Train Fest" to welcome excursion train passengers for the 2-hour layover. http://discoverscott.com/news/2013/oneida-destination-steam-train-excursion

Regarding the comments on the paint, to quote Sheriff Andy Taylor, "It was off!! It was way off!!"

i'm betting that the color was not arrived at haphazardly.

Just a guess, but I suspect that color will look totally different and much closer to the original shade of green when the museum is finished and the car is illuminated only by artficial light.

Neither the Smithsonian nor Wasatch is known for pulling paint colors out of their.......uh.....cabooses.

Humbug. Paint it the correct color. If it renders wrong in artificial lighting, then fix the artificial lighting. In the age of LEDs there is no excuse to have wrong light. Especially if you're the Smithsonian.

How do you do that? LEDs are made of every color, plus the whites which use phosphors to get nearly full spectrum. There are manufacturing variations, and they test and "bin" (verb) each one by wavelength or spectrum actually produced. You can order LEDs by color (rough) and bin (precise). So if you're building an LED array, you can "tune" the array to exactly the spectrum you want, either by binning, or by adjusting light output of particular LEDs or strings of a bin.

Heck, if you were building gold-plated, you just stick in an Arduino Mega microcontroller which could dynamically adjust each internal string of binned LEDs, with a spectrum sensor down on the exhibit. The controller would boot up, light each string one at a time, and learn its spectrum. Then light 'em all and trial-and-error until it produces the desired spectrum. It would be cool. And any high schooler could build it.

Perhaps you should contact the Smithsonian and tell them they are wrong.

Otherwise, maybe try reading your own sig line.

This is why so many hesitate to post anything on this forum.....the 'know it all's' just tear you to shreds for anything you do or don't do, as Steve Lee said to me on Wednesday his favorite reply to the know all's was 'show me the one you built/painted or whatever'.

For goodness sake just flippin appreciate what people are saving/restoring for once..

Mike Pannell

The best answer, as I learned from a body shop that was restoring some persnickety car owner's T-Bird, is to have someone else distract the SOB, and paint his paint chip/card while he's not looking.

Actually, there is truth to what everybody is saying.

The issue is, the hall is being lit with colors that will benefit all of the exhibits in the hall, not just the car. True, some directional lighting will be focused on the car, however, even with directional lighting, that light can and will "flood" to other areas.

Being that this car is 60 feet deep in the basement and being that all of the walls will be cement or gray colored with a lot of black accents, the lighting of the hall becomes difficult at best. A firm in New York was retained to handle the hall lighting and the individual artifact lighting in the hall. The "original" green was considered and the truth is, it would have appeared very dark or even black to the naked eye. The problem with that is, the general spectator, who has no idea what the true color was intended to be, would have easily missed the fact that the car is actually green.


During the process, the original color was evaluated by the New York firm. They then looked at many colors that we provided to them and they evaluated the colors in actual halls using the same lights that will be used in the hall. The goal was to find a color that would closely match what would have been the original color to the naked eye, in the hall, with the lighting that would prevail. This is the color that ended up being selected.

The photo we included in this post was taken at 4:00 p.m. in the most direct sun light possible. It shows the green in a very vibrant and light fashion. What is interesting is, when the sun goes down, or when the car is in the shed, it appears to be a very dark green, much more reminiscent of the original color.

Yes, I will be happy to post pictures of the interior. I need to down load them and then I will be back to post them. I will also post a few pictures of the car in less light. You will see a dramatic difference.

Final comment; It was commented that what we have done is actually a "model railraoders" trick. This is true. In fact the car was finished in a flat clear coat. It is not gloss, another trick to help the colors stand out more in the hall. Many tricks have been used to create an exhibit that is pleasing to the eye and when viewed, will appear historically correct.

Thank you John for sharing this information with us. But aside from the paint color, my general question is, why is the number of the car placed at each end? Most of Southern Railway's heavyweight passenger cars had the number in the center, unless the car was named. And it shouldn't be because the coach has Jim Crow accommodations, look at SERM's SOU 1212.

I have a photograph of SOU 1200 when it was at TVRM and the number is correctly placed in the center of the car from when it was in excursion service with Southern. These are the types of details that should be taken into mind when restoring a historically significant passenger car.

Ahh, the armchair quarterbacking and recriminations continue.... Few can see the nicely restored car for what it is. They all have to inflict anonymous criticism from behind computer screens.