Preserving History

The appearance of the Western Pacific Museum train from Portola as a main feature and draw for the 2011 Colfax Railroad Days event was enabled by a partnership between PSRHS and the Feather River Railroad Society.

This addition of the WP train attraction was a major success that led to a major increase in event attendance and also furthered the missions of both railroad heritage organizations.

The agreement between the two organizations to facilitate the train’s attendance in Colfax was that the host organization (PSRHS) was to fund the visiting FRRS volunteer staff’s lodging and per diem food allowance for the duration of their visit to Colfax.  Considering the visiting staff volunteers must take time off from their work schedules to accommodate a 5 to 6 day visit with the WP train, compensation for their expenses is a reasonable trade for the important contribution to the Colfax Railroad Days event and increase in visitor attendance.  Remember…”if you bring it, they will come”.  And indeed they did come.  Attendance of visitors was dramatically higher than in past years with Sunday being nearly, if not more, crowded with out of area visitors than Saturday.  In the past, the Sunday attendance was so low that for this year, the Chamber of Commerce had considered cancelling the event for Sunday.

The presence of a historic train with interesting pieces of rolling stock is what makes the difference.

The Society had reasonable success in sharing its vision with various Corporations to meet our financial goals to bring the WP train to Colfax Railroad Days.  Several corporations from out of the Colfax area made substantial cash contributions.  In addition, several individuals came forward with personal contributions to try to balance our cash needs.  However, this was still not quite enough to break even with our financial responsibilities.  The balance will need to come out of our Society’s cash account as well as some short term loans of individuals until our fund raising efforts bring us back to the black.

Some may wonder why we should make the effort to bring this expensive train to Colfax if we couldn’t meet our financial goals this year.  A number of reasons make this effort worthwhile.  For one, it fits into the mission of both our partnering railroad organizations which is to promote the history of the railroad through our region.  Next, the effort this year will lead to more publicity about the Colfax event in the future with greater attendance and thus, more support with contributions from donors as well as increased revenues to meet the expense needs and contribute to funding the Society’s projects.

Plus, the spinoff benefits add to the argument…the benefits to the Colfax Community as well as to the Positive results to further our other interests such as promoting railroad safety among the youth through Operation Lifesaver, Inc and our group’s desire to support the Community Relations efforts of Union pacific Railroad.

In short, PSRHS believes that in the future the risk of meeting our financial goals will be considerably reduced based on the success of this year’s effort.  We’ll do it again if we have the opportunity.

Finally, the hosting of the WP train required considerable material and logistical support for train movement and infrastructure while they were in Colfax.  A number of businesses provided beneficial in-kind services to greatly assist our efforts in supporting the train and its crew.

Thank you to all corporations, businesses and individuals to help us make our long term goal of bringing the WP train to Colfax a reality.

Jim Wood, President PSRHS