June 29, 2006
Rear View
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
When I'm on the road, I like to visit car museums, air museums, or train museums. On a recent trip to St. Louis, I was able to do it all in one stop. The National Transport Museum is located in Kirkwood, southwest of St. Louis, not far off I-270. It is primarily a train museum, with dozens of locomotives and rail cars on display.
 Union Pacific #4006 Big Boy
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The largest engine in the collection is a Union Pacific Big Boy, #4006, one of 25 built in the early 1940s to haul freight over the Rocky Mountains. The Big Boys were some of the largest steam locomotives ever, rivaling in size the Yellowstone class Mallet locomotives used by the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range (DM&IR) Railroad. By the way, train spotters, the only three DM&IR Mallet engines that survive are now on display in Duluth's Lake Superior Railroad Museum (#227) and in Proctor (#225) and Two Harbors (#229).
One of the oldest locomotives in the collection is the Daniel Nason, built in 1858 for the Boston & Providence Railroad. Resplendent in black and red, it is reminiscent of the engines seen in movies about the great migration of humanity that fanned out from St. Louis to parts west.
Of local interest at the Transport Museum is a donation from the DM&IR Railroad, a 2-10-2 locomotive built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1916. It was used to haul iron ore to the docks in Duluth.
The automobiles have their own building, the Earl C. Lindburg Automobile Center. The Lindburg family owned a successful Cadillac dealership in St. Louis, and donated some of their own rare cars to the museum.
There are about twenty cars and trucks on display, including one of the few remaining Chrysler Turbine cars built as an experiment in 1963. There is also a turbine-powered Ford truck, though the engine is under the cab and not generally shown to the public. The collection includes a couple of early vehicles built in the St. Louis area, a 1901 St. Louis and a 1908 Galloway Express truck. Just inside the door is the one-of-a-kind DiDia formerly owned by singer Bobby Darin. The remaining cars are pretty standard: A 1915 Ford Model T, a 1964 Ford Mustang, and a variety of 1950s family sedans. One of my favorite cars of all time is part of the collection, a 1932 Cord 812 convertible.
As to planes… well, there are only two of them, and only one is really on display at the moment. It's a C-47, the military version of the Douglas DC-3. The other is a Korean war era jet that I only caught a glimpse of, as it is still undergoing restoration. There is also a towboat, an everyday workhorse of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, but this is one of the first steel-hulled towboats. There are a few steam-powered rollers and miscellaneous farm machines, but railroading is the backbone of the museum.
Admission was only $4.00, a bargain for a couple of hours worth of exploring the railroads that were the main transportation of our country from the mid 1800s through the mid 1900s.