In 2007, Ohio volunteers saved a 1913 railcar once used as storage and reopened it as a railroad education centre for school and group visits

A 1913 Pennsylvania Railroad car in Urbana, Ohio, had spent years as a building-supply dealer’s office and storage space, which eventually became a small railroad education center. The car was donated to the Champaign County Preservation Alliance in 1999, moved to a new location with help from local groups and the city, and dedicated in 2007 as the Marion W. Parks Railroad Educational Center.The car was built in 1913 at the Pennsylvania Railroad shops in Altoona, Pennsylvania, as an X23 freight boxcar. The railroad faced a shortage of cabooses during World War II and converted 75 X23 boxcars for that purpose. The modifications included bay windows, round windows, a cooking and heating stove, a bunk, a booth, and storage lockers. The converted cars became known as NX23s and were used by the Pennsylvania Railroad during the 1950s and 1960s, which gave the Urbana car a second life on the railroad before it became a piece of local history.A Pennsylvania Railroad Historical Society record of surviving cabooses lists the Urbana car as PRR 478591, which is a wooden Class NX23 with bay windows. The organization’s inventory identifies only a limited number of surviving examples of the railroad’s former caboose fleet.From railroad equipment to storageThe Pennsylvania Railroad sold two of the cars to a local building-supply dealer on Miami Street in Urbana called Marion W. Parks in the late 1960s. Parks used them as an office and for storage, and the railroad car therefore remained part of the local landscape, but no longer had anything to do with moving trains.Only one car was considered salvageable by the time the Parks family donated them to the Champaign County Preservation Alliance in 1999. The preservation group worked with the Simon Kenton Corridor, Simon Kenton Pathfinders, Champaign County Historical Society and the City of Urbana to move the surviving car to its present location at 644 Miami St. The preservation effort was still underway in 2006, and a newsletter from the Lines West Buckeye Region Chapter of the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical & Historical Society reported that the NX23 was already at the Urbana site, although its original interior had been removed and had not yet been restored.The car got a new purposeThe Champaign County Preservation Alliance dedicated the car as the Marion W. Parks Railroad Educational Center in 2007, and the organization now welcomes classrooms, clubs and senior groups for meetings and tours, which gave the former railroad car an educational use after its working life ended. The educational center sits beside the former Pennsylvania Railroad depot, and keeps the caboose and depot together in the same historic area.The car provides a physical way to understand railroad equipment that would be difficult to understand from a textbook. Its windows, stove, bunk and other features were part of the practical arrangements that turned a freight boxcar into a caboose during the wartime shortage.One of a small number leftThe Pennsylvania Railroad Historical Society’s surviving-caboose inventory identifies the Urbana example as an NX23, while the preservation alliance says only four NX23s remain in the United States. The car preserves a particular type of Pennsylvania Railroad equipment that was first built as a freight car, converted for caboose service, sold into private use and eventually rescued by local preservationists. Today, the Marion W. Parks Railroad Educational Center uses that surviving car for school and group visits, and a vehicle that once followed freight trains now sits beside the old depot, with its history available to visitors rather than hidden away as storage space.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.