Gopher State Railway Museum

A big THANK YOU! to the New Prague Chamber of Commerce for their generous donation to Gopher State Railway Museum.

All of us at GSRM are thankful for the support we receive from the local community in working to reach our mission of educating the public through collection, acquisition, restoration and operation of railroad equipment and artifacts.

Please be sure to support the New Prague Area Chamber of Commerce and its local, member businesses.

Another beautiful Saturday in Minnesota. We made some progress on our on going track rebuild project we started two years ago already (where does time go?).

For those new to following us, we built about 3/4 mile of track on our property back in 2013-2015. We didn’t have money for ballast at the time so the track just sat atop the clay roadbed. Over time, the weight of running back and forth, especially when it was wet, pushed the track down into the clay. It got to a point we took most of it out of service. We ripped about half of it up and started over about two years ago. Today, we have about a quarter mile we can run on which is fully ballasted. We have about another 1000-plus feet or so we relaid last fall and winter, but it’s not spiked down. Between the two segments, we need to build a switch to connect them.

Today while a couple volunteers continued work on scraping peeling paint on the depot, the rest started spiking down track. The w**ds are winning and we spent the morning w**d whipping first, but we were able to spike down about 50’ of track today. Fingers crossed, we’ll have it all spiked down, ballasted and a switch built by fall which will not only allow us to provide a little longer train ride, we’ll be able to move NP 717 (our other Alco S-4 locomotive) and Silver Crest (our Burlington coach) closer to the north end for better access to work on them and make them available to visitors.

If you’re looking for some good exercise and don’t want to join a gym, we can always use more volunteers helping with track work. No experience needed, we’ll teach you, all you need is energy, enthusiasm and some sturdy steel toed boots.