- Over the weekend, the Shafter Depot Museum held a grand opening for a new exhibit featuring a 1940's caboose that was restored to a similar fashion to what would have been on rail lines approximately 80 years ago.
- The video shows Shafter Depot Museum curator Stan Wilson taking 23ABC on a tour aboard the newly opened caboose.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
This past weekend, over 100 people were right behind me at the Shafter Depot Museum, touring the new exhibit.
"What we have done inside the caboose here is put some of the objects — railroad objects that we have are in an exhibit. We have them exhibited in this case," said Wilson.
The rail car — built in the early forties, rebuilt in the late sixties and retired in the late eighties — was restored by the museum to showcase what this car could have looked like when it was in service. Stan Wilson, the curator of the museum said they moved the caboose onto the museum grounds during the summer of 2022 and wrapped up the restoration inside the car in 2023. For Wilson, the addition to the museum is an important commemoration to the history of the railroad running through Shafter.
"How things were done in the past explains a lot about how things are going on in the present. You have to have a foundation of where we have come from and what we've done and also memorialize the forefathers. This was their occupation"
And for Shafter, that rail history was agriculturally based..
"It was pretty much all agriculture because that is really the only industry of this area."
And while the museum, commemorates the past, rail history is still running right through Shafter..
The Fresno Subdivision of Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail line runs right through the heart of Shafter, but down the line closer to Bakersfield sits the Wonderful Industrial Park that joins with the rail line continuing the history of Shafter's ability to export goods via rail, but in Wilson's mind, they could be sending out even more.
"We have huge warehouses out there and there really needs to be a much greater push on using rail transportation for, for our warehousing because there's just plain too many trucks on the road."
If you missed the grand opening this past weekend, no worries. The Depot Museum is open every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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