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ARKANSAS TRAVEL: Time-travel at one of state's train depot museums

Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott displays a scale-model steam locomotive, tender, tank car and caboose made by Dennis R. Hill.
Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott displays a scale-model steam locomotive, tender, tank car and caboose made by Dennis R. Hill.

Railroad enthusiasts in Arkansas have to subsist mainly on nostalgia. That's because only six depots in The Natural State remain open for passenger service -- once daily in each direction between Chicago and San Antonio, with most stops occurring in the middle of the night.

Happily for train buffs (and the rest of us), there's plenty of choo-choo history built into the nearly 100 stations still standing across Arkansas. They date to the glory days of passenger railroading from the last few decades of the 19th century through World War II.

"Like the county courthouses, post offices and city halls of the past, the local railroad depot developed as a meeting and gathering place for the community, and the arrivals of passenger trains became major events of the day," according to "Historic Railroad Depots of Arkansas 1870-1940," an article by William D. Baker posted on the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program's website.

"Townfolk met, noticed who arrived and departed, helped unload freight and picked up mail. The standardization of railroad schedules was the impetus for the development of national time zones, and for the first time Arkansas communities abandoned their local systems for the Central Time Zone."

Along with the half-dozen depots still used by Amtrak (in Walnut Ridge, Little Rock, Malvern, Arkadelphia, Hope and Texarkana), a good many are occupied by private businesses, chambers of commerce or government offices. Others are vacant. At least three have been converted to private homes.

But a dozen or more are open to sightseers as visitor centers and/or museums focused on railroading and other topics. They make feel-good targets for day trips -- and perhaps a revelation to younger family members who've never enjoyed a ride on an actual train.

The passion for model railroading that some Arkansans have carried from their childhood Lionel and American Flyer layouts into later life is manifest at Nevada County Depot and Museum in Prescott. The station, which saw its last Missouri Pacific passenger run in 1972, displays a scaled-down locomotive and tender (coal car) built years ago by Dennis R. Hill to run on track in his yard near Arkadelphia.

In Russellville's Historic Missouri Pacific Train Depot, opened in 1917 to replace the original 1888 station, four rooms restored as a museum give a clear sense of what railroad travel in the South was like during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation.

Southern law and custom back then specified separate waiting rooms for white passengers and black passengers. In the room set aside for white people, the transom hardware dates to 1917. In the space for black passengers, the mirror in the restroom is thought to be the original. The impressive timepiece on the walls in the former station master's office is an eight-day railway clock made in 1910. It still gets the needed winding once a week.

In the state's far north, the depot museum at Mammoth Spring State Park also has separate white and black waiting rooms, restored as they likely looked after the station opened in 1885 for tourists arriving to enjoy the spa waters. It's no surprise that the facility for white passengers is larger and better furnished than the one for black passengers. A dozen life-size mannequins add to the station's sense of time travel.

Brinkley's Central Delta Depot Museum is housed in what was touted as the Rock Island Line's most impressive depot between Memphis and Little Rock when it opened in 1912. That was thanks to its spacious wing design with freight rooms at each end. Displayed on the museum grounds is a smaller century-old frame depot moved here from the town of Monroe. There's also a Southern Pacific caboose, one of the last built for that line in the 1980s.

Among other former depots with tourist facilities, the handsome Union Pacific station built in 1912 in downtown Helena (now Helena-West Helena) houses one of Arkansas' most notable museums, the Delta Cultural Center.

Old-time depots also provide exhibits or other visitor services in Decatur, Earle, Eureka Springs, Glenwood, Gurdon, Hope, McGehee, Mena and Pine Bluff. Not all the displays focus on railroad history. But the settings in former stations can evoke the heyday of train travel.

Surviving train stations in Arkansas are listed online at american-rails.com/states.html. Hours vary at depots open to visitors, with admission generally free. The article "Historic Railroad Depots of Arkansas 1870-1940," by William D. Baker, can be found at arkansaspreservation.com.

Weekend on 03/01/2018

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