I made a little road trip to the village of North Freedom to visit the Mid-Continent Railway Museum. I’ve been living in Madison, just an hour’s drive from North Freedom, for almost fifteen years but this is the first time I’ve visited the museum. About an hour’s drive from our little red house, North Freedom reminded me of the very small town in Waupaca County where I grew up.

The museum is just outside the village proper. It’s mostly an open-air museum with a half-dozen or so examples of rolling stock in a small yard next to a railway depot. There were a couple steam locomotives that obviously hadn’t raised steam in years and were just for display, coaches and freight cars fading in the sun, and a rotary snow plow that was slowly falling apart where it stood. Across the road there was a train shed which held maybe a half-dozen coaches and a caboose, all of which had been restored to like-new condition but the doors on all of them were all locked up; there was no way to get inside and I couldn’t see much through the windows because most of them were dark inside.

There was a small diesel switching locomotive pulling a couple sun-bleached coaches into the yard when I got there and a volunteer in the depot told me I could get a ride on it at one o’clock, but I didn’t stay that long.