Our motorhome was back in the spotlight for a couple of reasons this week…

We hadn’t licensed it in Nebraska, because we are thinking to sell our beautiful home on wheels, and the license change seemed superfluous. But when we cancelled our Florida insurance, and insured it here, the state of Florida got upset. They thought we were driving without insurance… Anyway, we decided to finally register it in Nebraska. That meant driving it to the DMV office so they could verify everything they needed to verify. So here it is waiting for verification. It now is officially a Nebraska resident.

The other event in the motorhome’s life is its desire for a new windshield. We had some glass damage last summer, and it has taken this long for the insurance to 1) authorize repair, 2) find a company near us to do the work, and 3) wait for nice enough weather to do it! So we needed to drive it to Omaha very early in the morning… but the storage place where we keep it isn’t open that early, so we took it to the campground where we’ve stayed when visiting Lincoln.

Usually the campground is home to horses and rodeo type events. This day it looked like it was big tractor demonstration day. There were several HUGE tractors, and they just drove around in circles in a closed off lot. Somebody was having fun test driving them.

While there, we took a walk down the walking trail adjacent to the camp. I’m really only including these pictures for the contrast with those I’ve posted before, when things were a lot greener. And last week I showed pictures of trees with Eagles perched, here we have trees with shoes. See how many you can find!

So very early the next morning, we drove to Omaha to be there before they opened. They spent the day getting a new windshield installed, we spent the day at a train museum.

The Union Pacific Railroad Museum is just across the state line in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Council Bluffs is famous with railroad fans, or history buffs, for being the launching point for the Transcontinental Railroad project of the 1860’s. Abraham Lincoln was instrumental in creating the railroad. The first passenger railroad in the U.S. ran in 1830. Lincoln was 23 years old, and realized the importance of rail transportation in the growing country. The irony was that he had never seen a train before he began his advocacy.

You can read a bit more about Lincoln and the railroad here:

This is a mockup of a car designed for Abraham Lincoln – the presidential coach, rather like Air Force One today. Sadly, he never lived to ride in it… but after his assassination, his body rode in this car across the country to his burial site in Springfield, Illinois.

Building a railroad to the California coast from Council Bluffs was an unimaginable task. All ground work was done with shovels and picks… with people holding them. This display talked about huge snowstorms in the Sierra Nevadas, resulting in up to 25 feet of snow blocking their progress. Snow sheds were built in places to keep the railroad moving.

Some amazing bridges were built. The longest was the Dale Creek Bridge – 650 feet long, 150 feet above the bottom of the gorge. It was said to sway so dramatically in the wind that they used every rope they could find to hold the bridge in place. As soon as they could, they replaced the ropes with steel cables.

In 1809, 1870, and 1972, Congress considered and rejected calls to establish Standard Time. Every town in the country would set their clocks so noon was when the sun was highest in the sky. But railroads needed consistent time to schedule trains running across the country. So they decided the country into 4 time zones, and established Railroad Standard Time. The government finally adopted the railroad’s time zones… in 1918!

As railroads sped valuable cargo, payrolls, and wealthy passengers across the country, train robberies became prevalent. The railroads hired Pinkerton Detectives and then created their own police departments to stop the robberies.

A mockup of a train station office.

Telegraph became a vital tool for the railroads. Below is a machine that would listen to Morse Code and punch a paper tape with the dots and dashes.

Below is a little information on the Caboose… and how it was vital to operation of the train…

Until it wasn’t. Now trains use automated End of Train devices like this to relay information to the engines up front, and act as a taillight.

Here’s a fun old tool… used to run a mirror along the track to see under the flanged top.

To explain this picture, you have to read the sign below it…

As railroads became more popular, they would compete with each other for passengers. Union Pacific did a lot of forward thinking to advance their railroad.

Union Pacific went to many popular tourist sites, like Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Yosemite. But they had little traffic there in the winter. So they created a ski resort in Idaho… Sun Valley. A beautiful resort fashioned as a quaint European town. There was only one thing missing… a way to get folks to the mountain tops to ski down! One of the Union Pacific Engineers was tasked with creating a solution. He had seen bananas being loaded on ships with a cable system. He figured moving people would be a lot like moving bananas… you don’t want to bruise them or drop them! He experimented with a moving chair system. To test it, he fixed a chair on the side of a pickup truck and had it drive slowly by him, so he could sit on the chair as it moved. It was a success, and he created the world’s first chair lift!