Memorial Day Weekend Washout – sort of

The first big holiday of the summer season found the Milwaukee Railroad Shops Historic District trying to dry out. Wednesday night May 23^rd Sioux City had a gully washer of a rail storm come through dumping 2-3 inches of rain in the Riverside area. All this water in such a short time allowed for little soak in time and the runoff from the Losses Hills and Iowa Hwy 12 assaulted the rail yard leaving drains plugged up with debris resulting in water up to a foot deep in some area of the complex. The turntable pit filled half way up, the maintenance pits in the roundhouse had water in them and some low level flooding caused water to seep through the doors and on to the floor of the machine shop building. 

With more rain in the forecast for the weekend it was determined that for the safety of our visitors, due to all the high water and mud, that we would close to the public for the weekend in an effort to dry out. The Sioux City Journal posted the closing along with onsite television reports from local stations and the radio. The volunteers showed up Friday, Saturday and Sunday to assist with the clean-up and work on other projects.

Well, never let it be said that you can keep a good thing down. Even though the local visitors stayed away; the out town folks flocked in. Not knowing of our soggy dilemma our out of town visitors showed up in bunches and after traveling as far as 2-3 hours they did not want to go back empty handed so they braved the conditions and made the best of it. We could not find it in our hearts to turn away someone that had traveled so far so we gladly greeted them and invited them into the museum. As a matter of fact, our out of town visitor traffic was so high on Friday and Saturday that we had to call in extra volunteers to help out.

Due to the high water even the animals were searching for higher ground. In one instance this allowed us a unique opportunity to teach some of the younger folks about Mother Nature and her wonderful art of camouflage as can be seen by the tree frog in the picture below; hanging out on the hand railing of our open box car exhibit. 

Everyone made the most of the soggy muddy conditions and where eventually able to find some (almost) drier paths to navigate around the rail yard complex. For those that traveled to see us; thank you for coming up to spend some time at our railroad museum. We hope to see you back soon – under drier conditions of course :-).