Make Cincinnati Weird!

Photo by K. LeMaster/Building Cincinnati

Founded in 1975, the non-profit railway museum, located in the four-acre Latonia Yard, has a permanent collection of 37 pieces of historic equipment from the seven railroads entering Cincinnati.

So says Building Cincinnati, in a post about May’s Covington After Hours, about the Railway Museum of Greater Cincinnati.

I’ve probably driven down Decoursey Ave. in Latonia about a thousand times, so I’m fairly familiar.  I know about Johnny’s Toys and the now-vacant Value City store.  But I never knew there was a whole museum dedicated to trains hidden back there!

After a bit more digging, I turned up an old Cincinnati Post story (on the Wayback Machine) on the museum.

Some people never stop playing with trains.

Take 84-year-old Bill Ewing of Anderson Township, whose ”toy” is a real, bright yellow B&O Railroad caboose, for which he paid $2,500 15 years ago.

He keeps it in the rail yard of the Railway Museum of Greater Cincinnati, in Covington’s Latonia neighborhood, where he and other volunteers work on the museum’s 80-piece collection every Wednesday and Saturday.

… In the rail yard, each car has a unique story, and Ewing is eager to tell them.

A tiny green engine with a No. 1 on its face used to push coal into a power house, he said.

He helped paint a dark green passenger car, which he said was at least 75 years old. ”It’s priceless,” he said.

A red passenger car, which had two master bedrooms and a shower, was one of four end cars for the Broadway Limited in New York, volunteer Bill Williams said.