Local Adventures
We stopped by the Arizona Railway Museum yesterday, another item on Jen’s Museums of Metro Phoenix quest.
It’s quite a collection of train cars, spread over 4 rail tracks. You can go inside about a dozen of them, but about half are apparently privately owned and stored here, so those are off limits. There’s a QR code to a detailed interpretative page and audio guide to each of the train cars you can tour.
There’s also a “party caboose” you can rent out, which was hosting a birthday party during our visit. There’s a very small indoor museum that seems very much like an afterthought. The museum is not so much about railroads in general (their history, impact, routes, and so forth), but definitely geared towards railcars specifically, and primarily passenger railcars.
Most of the trains here were owned privately by collectors from around the country and were eventually donated and moved here.
If you like trains, especially passenger trains with interesting features and configurations, you’ll probably enjoy the place.
I watched artisans pour molten bronze to make some of those famous Cosanti bells today, while we toured Paulo Solari’s…uhhh…experimental “sustainable urban design” studio/foundry (a companion to his “arcology” installation, Arcosanti) for our Phoenix Culture Pass quest.
I finally brought Jen over to Arizona Falls today. Situated at a natural 20-foot drop along the Arizona Canal, the site is home to Phoenix first hydroelectric power station, built back in 1902. Today it powers ~150 homes in the area while serving as a neighborhood attraction and recreation spot.
These are just looped Live Photos, but couldn’t figure out how to post them correctly so I just imported them as quick videos.
And a few more photos, including some interpretative info.
We stopped by the Adobe Mountain Desert Railroad Park for Jen’s Museums of Phoenix quest. The park is a large undeveloped lot at the edge of Adobe Mountain Park that houses a number of train-related endeavors: the Sahuaro Central Railroad Museum, the Arizona Model Railroading Society/Arizona Garden Railway Society, the Arizona Model Railroading Society, and the Maricopa Live Steamers.
The park also contains some World War II-era Internment Camp Houses that were originally intended as temporary housing at the Leupp Isolation Center for Japanese-Americans during WWII.
We were there for the museum, but may have to return to see the internment camp houses, which I only discovered after looking up the official park name for this post.
We have a strong connection to the internment camp saga, having completed a quest to visit all ten of the Japanese internment camps in 2019 after accidentally running across the remains of Gila River/Butte Camp about a dozen miles south of our house (that episode probably deserves its own blog post). We’ve also visited a number of related “bonus” sites, including a visit to the very Leupp isolation site on the Navajo Reservation that these camp houses came from.
Anyway, the railroad museum contained all sorts of train-related paraphernalia, from models to old posters and memorabilia, to artifacts and such. There were several small trains you could ride, as well as a model train display. It was a quick visit for us, but if you love trains I bet this place is great for conversing with fellow aficionados.
We visited the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Cultural Center & Museum today for Jen’s Phoenix Museums quest. It’s much more cultural center than museum, but we enjoyed a 90+ minute conversation with the museum director about the tribe’s history, culture, and its future.
A few video clips from paddling the Lower Salt River
I ran across a few short video clips from various trips down the Lower Salt River and thought I’d toss them into a short post here.