Oscar's Museum of Awesomeness

This is Oscar. Oscar the Octogenarian. Oscar, who retired from his federal government job years ago, has worked in the Glenwood Railway Museum since it opened about five years ago. The “museum” has two rooms inside the building that houses the Glenwood Springs Amtrak station, and features a model train set in the middle of the room and various train paraphernalia around the walls. Oscar told me that he first got interested in trains when he rode them around a lot in the years soon after World War II. So when the chance to work in the museum came up, he jumped at it. If you step into the museum, chances are Oscar will follow you around and describe whatever it is you happen to glance at. “That’s a steam whistle from 1921. It has four chambers so a skilled conductor could almost play a song. Station managers got so they could tell who was coming in on a train by the whistle.” And so on.

Glenwood Springs is about halfway along the two-day California Zephyr line between Chicago and San Francisco, so it is more common for trains to be delayed coming in than it is for them to be on time. It seems that the museum is there just so people like me can have something to do other than sit on broken benches for an hour or two while waiting. But don’t tell Oscar.