Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum
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The Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum is located at 1919 Ninth Street, Calera, Alabama.
It features a wide range of locomotives, cars and other railroad equipment that dates from the 1800s to the 1950s.
It also features two depots that are approximately 100 years old.
It also is home to a privately owned dinner train.
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[edit] Heritage railroad
The museum operates a heritage railroad that offers two excursion trains every Saturday from March 31 - December 17. It also operates excursions on special dates such as Halloween and Christmas.
One train operates with a diesel locomotive on a 5.5 mile section of former Louisville and Nashville Railroad track. The other train operates on a 2runs on a one-quarter-mile long loop featuring a two foot gauge live steam engine locomotive.
[edit] History
- The Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum, Inc. began as the Heart of Dixie Railroad Club. Its first location was at 18th St. S and 1st Ave. N in Downtown Birmingham, across from the Alabama Power Steam Generation Plant. The cars were largely donated to the Club by their respective railroads. However, the cars were vulnerable to vandals. Several cars were burned in different disputes over territory by homeless people. In the Early 1980s, the Club moved to Calera and secured several hundred acres of land between 17th Ave and 20th Ave along 9th St.
- The Calera and Shelby Railroad (the standard-gauge trains) run along a five-and-one-half-mile section of the former L&N Mineral loop, constructed in 1891 to collect the minerals necessary for making iron, then looping back to Birmingham to drop off the minerals at the local ironworks. The line was abandoned when Alabama Power dammed up the Coosa River for a new hydroelectric plant. This would have flooded the bridge over the Coosa River, which was subsequently removed. CSX later pulled up the rails along the line. Eleven miles of right-of-way were purchased by the Heart of Dixie Railroad Club (now Heart of Dixie Railroad Museum, Inc.) when they moved to Calera in the 1980s. Since then, the museum has been replacing the track along the right-of-way. The track currently ends at Springs Junction, Alabama, just East of its crossing of Alabama State Highway 86.
- The Shelby and Southern (the two-foot-gauge train) rolling stock is the former park train of the Birmingham Zoo. Some two-foot-gauge track was purchased, a station and maintenance shed were built, the cars were sandblasted, re-lettered, and re-painted, and the propane fired 4-4-0 steam engine was sent to the Tweetsie Railroad for refurbishment. The S&S opened during Day Out With Thomas 2002, a two-weekend period where Thomas the Tank Engine comes to visit the museum.
[edit] Other Points of Interest
- The William A. Boone Memorial Library is located in the Woodlawn Depot, across the road from the main museum. It houses a sizeable repository of railroad-related books and technical manuals.
- The William Penn Dinner Train is privately owned by several members and operates out of the museum. It holds open reservation dinners monthly and is available for charter. Its equipment consists of a recently refurbished ex-Pennsylvania Railroad Budd-built parlor car converted by Amtrak to a dining car named after William Penn and a 48-seat coach leased from a museum member
