New Colorado Trains & Planes Exhibit at DIA!

Colorado Railroad Museum Traveling Exhibit Stops at the Denver International Airport

We have been working with the Denver International Airport over the last month and a half to create the exhibit, Colorado Trains & Planes. The partnering organizations include: Wings Over the Rockies; RTD Denver; DEN (Denver International Airport), airport staff who collect and the Colorado Railroad Museum.  Our portion of the exhibit celebrates the Museum’s 60^th anniversary.  It features a number of objects from the permanent collection and a few pieces borrowed from our friends – thank you Denver Garden Railway Society, Tom Brunner and Chuck Conway.

The Colorado Railroad Museum Featured Exhibits

The exhibit will be seen by the approximately 250,000 people who walk through the hall on a monthly basis.  It was wonderful to see people interact with our cases just during the time we were installing it.  A couple of our visitors stopped to tell us how much they enjoyed visiting us in Golden and one boy proudly showed me the train socks he was wearing that his parents had purchased there.  Others asked how they could visit us and a number shared train stories of their own.

Jeppesen Terminal

So, if you are traveling (and even if you just want to take a look) between now and March 2019, the exhibit is located in the Jeppesen Terminal, level 6 North, walkway before A Bridge Security.

A Special Thanks to Everyone Who Made This Possible

This project took a lot of help and I want to thank our library volunteers who pulled, cleaned and prepared over 60 objects for travel; Charles Albi, Stephanie and volunteers for reviewing text to make sure we had it right; Chad who worked with the airport to create this opportunity, Jeff H and Evan who helped move objects into the van; Matt who worked to help find images we could use in the design; Danielle for checking 2019 dates; Marcie and Donald for being great sounding boards (and allowing us to use his bell). The Garden Railway who loaned us locomotives (a goose and a Thomas). A special thanks also goes to Stephanie and Mark for their help in installation at the airport.  I greatly appreciated everyone’s input and elbow grease.

Finally, we are pleased to be able to reassure people that our textile and paper objects will enjoy UV filtered cases. We also took care to encapsulate the paper tickets, brochures, menus, postcards and timetables in Mylar so that they are even more protected in the beautifully sunny hall that hosts the exhibit!

UPDATE: Want to see more images of the exhibit including some from the other contributors? Click here for an expanded gallery!