Inside an 1800s Railroad Depot | History Traveler Episode 75

[Music] in the last episode we were in omaha nebraska and council bluffs iowa exploring the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad this week we're still in council bluffs and looking at travel at the turn of the century at the rails west museum in council [Music] bluffs [Music] well behind me right here is an old train depot that to the best of my understanding was built in the late 1800s so it wasn't at the exact time that the transcontinental railroad was built but it it was right here where it started and was in use for a long time has since been i guess kind of restored and is currently the rails west museum right here in council bluffs iowa so we're going to go in here and take a look around and see what we can learn all right well i just walked into the depot here and something that i really found interesting about this place is that it has two main rooms one of them is a men's waiting room and the other one is for women and children this is where the men would have waited for their train the reason it was segregated was that men could be together and could smoke and could i guess maybe use vulgarity or talk that they typically wouldn't around women women would be in the other room we'll go in there in a second but it's right in here uh and you know they could feed their kids um you know but anyway just kind of interesting to to think about the the differences uh between then and now if you go to the airport today well one of the first things that they have to do is weigh your luggage and it's no different in the late 1800s here's a big old scale that they used to weigh people's luggage make sure that i guess it wasn't too heavy huh that's pretty cool now what i'm looking at right here is the ticket office we're gonna just kind of dodge in here and see what we can see and there's all kinds of just interesting artifacts from the time period so it kind of takes you back into what it would have been like in 1899 got some of these old telegraph machines [Music] very interesting [Music] so [Music] i'm now walking from the men's waiting room into the women's waiting room [Music] so you can see they have a lot of again just really interesting old artifacts related to uh train travel around the turn of the century some of this old luggage here [Music] here they have an original uniform like what a train operator would have worn pretty interesting [Music] and then some silverware pretty fancy now here is something that has really become a relic an old pay phone booth that's actually pretty cool this one's made of wood [Music] wow yeah this is i don't know kind of cool this is a little step stool that was created to help passengers on and off of the train something else to note about this place if you look here at these tiles these are all original to the depot as well as this floor and all of the wood so they've done a really good job at preserving this little piece of history here [Music] we are just now walking out of the the depot so this is the door that the women would have walked out of and then if you go right over here this is the door that the men would have walked out of they would have met right here along this brick path and then hopped on their train right here so this is still an active track that that is in use today something else that's kind of interesting about this depot if you'll notice this color brick right here is different from this color brick well the reason for that is is that this right over here uh used to be open and the reason that it was open was for horse carriages to come in they would unload their luggage unload people and then they could go inside the depot and wait for the train to get here but it got bricked up in the 1950s because obviously there's not horse carriages anymore very very cool place well here at the uh the rails west museum they also have a bunch of trains on display that you can go look at in addition to the depot itself uh including this giant monstrosity behind me uh that i think was built in the 1930s you see this big like 74 72 inch wheelbase so anyway we're going to go take a look at some of these trains and look at a little bit of the history of travel here in the united states what we are looking at here is a rolling mail car so this is pretty interesting you can see where all of the letters would have been sorted something that really surprised me is that this is from the 1960s so they were still using rail traffic for the mail in the 1960s and this thing wouldn't stop so be rolling along about 80 miles an hour and they would have to pick up and drop off bags of mail while they were moving and it was expected that each person working here could sort 600 pieces of mail per hour pretty interesting i was just mentioning how the workers on this mail car would have to pick up and drop off mail well this is a mail crane so what you would do is you would hang your mail off of that thing and as the train rolled by they would pick it up uh or drop off bags of mail looks like a good way to get hurt this engine right here is a coal burning engine that was built in 1902 and later was transitioned over to an oil burning engine we're going to walk up here and just take a quick look yeah so this is what the view would have been like huh it always amazes me looking at this stuff that people built these things just the the engineering that went behind it is always impressive to me about fell down all right i see a rope and if i look outside i see that the rope is connected to a bell now the car that i'm walking into right now is a pre world war ii club car so you can see there's a little kitchen area here and prior to world war two you would bring your food along and then you could have that to cook your food and then you can see they've got a little dining area here and then if you go a little further back look at how nice this is you go into an airplane now and you're all crammed if you get in the economy seating look at how spacious and comfortable this is all of this stuff that you see in here is original pretty cool [Music] wow i love this car this this one's really interesting to me [Music] now here's another old caboose that we can't go into because they are in the process of restoring it but something that's interesting up here that's called a cupula i think was the the term for it well that's where somebody in the caboose could poke their head up and they could see down the train in case there were any fires or any trouble or anything like that just so that you could get a look at your whole train line [Music] and as we mentioned before this is still an active track so kind of cool that something that started back in the 1860s with the transcontinental railroad is still active today all right well that was the rails west museum right here in council bluffs iowa at the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad very cool place uh learned learned quite a bit today history i mean it's like a bunch of puzzle pieces you take a little piece here little piece there and once you get enough pieces you start getting a little bit better idea of the bigger picture and this was just another piece a very interesting place that that's worth visiting but anyway tomorrow morning we will be off to the next spot you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 27,717

Rating: 4.9856114 out of 5

Keywords: history, history traveler, history underground, travel, omaha, council bluffs, transcontinental, railroad, iowa, nebraska, jd huitt, education, rails, rails west, western, trans, railroad museum, museum, trains

Id: EX9RBIGW4XI

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020