Now I will tell you all about the second day of Railroad Days, this was Sunday June 21,2009. My traveling companion today was Norah Kathleen.
Today we went to the Durham Museum which is located in the Omaha Union Station. Union Station was built in the early 1930s and has been beautifully restored to how it originally looked. You walk into the lobby of Union Station and there is the arrival / departure board that tells when trains will be arriving or leaving and on what track. They had the ticket windows where you purchased your round trip tickets for the train. Norah Kathleen and I purchased tickets so we could ride the train too. In the lobby there were many bronze statues of individuals who would have been at the train station ---such as ticket agents, passengers on the trains, porters, soldiers on leave, etc... Each of these bronze displays would tell a different story when you got close to it. They were so neat, host mom took a lot of pictures of the union station lobby and these displays. They also had an old fashioned soda fountain and snack bar where you could get something to eat while waiting for your train to arrive.
Then we went downstairs to the train tracks! Here we got to go inside actual train cars that were on display. We went into a Pullman car and got to see how the Pullman berths worked, these were fold down beds that you could sleep on while traveling across country. Wouldn't that have been fun? We laughed and laughed when we saw the small bathrooms on the train. They had a sign that said do not flush the toilet when the train was standing in the station.. hahaha!
We also saw the dining car where you could eat your meals, and the lounge car where you could have a drink and relax. They had a neat mirrored bar at one end of the lounge car, so we went up to the bar and asked for a drink! They served us a Shirley Temple to drink. We had never heard of this drink, but it had cherries in it so we liked it. We think that traveling by train would be the best thing ever!
We also got to ride on an old trolley car on display at the museum, that was pretty neat. They also had an old stagecoach that was used to deliver the US Mail, and a covered wagon used by settlers heading west. There also was a HUGE buffalo there on display, we got to feel the buffalo hide... the fur was softer than we thought it would be. They also had an Indian tepee and an earth lodge on display, we had fun playing in those. Too bad my friend Kaya could not come with us today, she would have liked this display a lot.
They had historical room displays in the museum as well as an old general store. These displays were fun to see and we took lots of pictures of us in the various rooms through out the years. They had kitchens, classrooms, parlors, bedrooms, and living rooms from various time periods on display.
As we were leaving Union Station, they had some really old cars outside on display. There was a display commemorating the 100 year anniversary of the historic cross country trip made by Alice Ramsey in 1909. She was the first female to drive across the country in an automobile! It took her 3 months to travel from New York to California, that was one very long trip. She was very adventurous and brave. We took our pictures with old cars from this time period that were like the cars that she drove. The nice man who owned one of the cars even let us sit inside the car, we pretended we were Alice Ramsey.
We had another fun-filled day and learned a lot. Here are some links to websites about the Railroad Days and about Alice Ramsey:
Here is our photo album from today: http://picasaweb.google.com/xmaskat/TravelingKitSRailroadDaysAdventurePart2#
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