Dan Gallagher Wrote:
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> I've noticed that Snoqualmie RR Museum is running
> an 0-4-0 steam locomotive from CA. How does this
> fit with their mission? It is not a NW loco by any
> means...is it just a fill-in until they get a real
> NW loco restored?

How does the Southern Pacific 4449 fit into the Pacific Northwest? Answer - it doesn't. There's basically a small number of pictures of it having come into Portland on WWII troop trains (most definitely not in red and orange), and the Shasta Daylight was introduced post-WWII as a diesel train. The 4449 was saved only because it was the locomotive at the end of a long string of deadlined locomotives, so it was the easiest to pull out and send to Portland for display.

How does the NKP 190 or 745 fit into the PNW? Like the 4449 neither of these engines have anything to do with Oregon rail heritage.

But to the average member of the general public, they don't care about those pesky little details. They say "oooh, that's a big steam locomotive!". To the average steam locomotive enthusiast, they probably don't care as much about the specific locomotive's history in respect to the geography of where it is. It's no different than the Oregon Electric Railway Museum owning trolleys from Australia, Hong Kong, Portugal, and even a PCC car (which no Oregon trolley/interurban used). Its three trolleybuses have zero Oregon pedigree and neither does its three electric motors.

The Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad has two steam locomotives, neither of which has a history on the Oregon Coast. Then again, neither does Rayonier #90 on display in Garibaldi (which is somehow now painted as "Southern Pacific 90".

And let's look at the dozens of tourist railroads/museums that operate passenger equipment that is in no way historical to where the line operated. Oregon has more RDCs today than it ever did, when RDCs were new (which, by the way, the exact number of RDCs operated in the 1950s-1960s in Oregon is zero.) SP Herriman commuter coaches were common in San Francisco, not in Oregon.

In a perfect world, a museum would be able to have exactly the items it needs to tell a story. But so much of railroad history is long lost, that museums get what they can, and have to tell the story as best as possible with what is had. That means equipment from outside of the area. A steam engine is, to the general public, a steam engine - they can't tell the difference between Thomas the Tank Engine and a Union Pacific Big Boy. And if tourist railroads and railroad museums only catered to railfans and enthusiasts...my guess is 99% of them would go out of business very, very quickly.

And it isn't just a railroad thing - what does the Spruce Goose have to do with McMinnville, Oregon? Absolutely, positively nothing - except the inflated ego of a businessman whose empire is now completely gone...and now he's dead too. And the rest of that museum? Except for a couple of the Evergreen Helicopters fleet on display, McMinnville never had any history as a Air Force base or Navy air station or any other significant aviation history, save for having an airport that had plenty of Cessna 172s fly in and out of it. The Tillamook Air Museum - why does it have a Navy F-14 Tomcat? NAST was a WWII blimp base; it never saw a F-14 based there. Or any of the other aircraft located there.