Welcome to the Arkansas Railroad Museum here at 1700 Port Road of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

My name is J.P. Dungar, and I'm a volunteer with the Cotton Belt Rail Historical Society.

The 819 is a steam engine is located behind me right here.

It was built in 1942, 1943.

It was used as a freight engine and also in passenger service.

It was put in the city park in Pine Bluff and sat there for about 30 years.

And all the children in the neighborhood came and played on it.

Then it was brought back to the museum in the late eighties.

It was reconditioned and it ran on excursions until 1994, and it is retired now.

(upbeat music) This is an old, old caboose.

It's from the 1920s.

This is where the trainmen, the conductor and the brakemen lived when they were away from home.

And I will give you a surprise.

This is not the steering wheel.

This is the handbrake.

So when it's sitting still, you put the handbrake on to keep it from rolling.

Our modern technology today did away with this.

And what they have come up with is this flashing red light that's in front of me.

That's what it took to place of the caboose and two men.

On the caboose, we had marker lights.

These are the lights on either side of the caboose here.

The red meant there was not another train coming.

If they was turned where there would be green at and another train was behind them.

In 1920s, they did not have the modern railroad communication with radios, so they had to use signals.

So I'm will give you a hand signal.

This meant to pick up.

This was a signal to tell you how many cars and when your people did this, that's what it meant behind.

So you were going to pick up 20 cars behind those 20 cars and all the signals were given by hands.

And people sometimes would work 8 hours and never talk to each other.

This was also the conductor's workshop.

This is where he did all his paperwork.

(soft music) This is our museum inside the museum.

This is a lot of artifacts that are small and easy to put more than one thing in a display case.

And we have to protect it from the elements and everything.

That's the reason this thing is so cold in here.

(soft piano music) We have uniforms that the conductors and the brakemen wore on passenger trains.

We have the uniforms that the cooks wore on the passenger trains.

We have the buttons off of the uniform from different railroads.

And people don't realize how many railroads there were back in those days until you actually come and see all these buttons.

Oh, my gosh.

There's that many railroads?

And we have pictures on the wall from the different types of equipment and everything.

We have a watch stand the watchmaker used.

You had to have a watch back in those days cause you ran on the watch.

You had a card in your pocket, and your supervisor would ask you to see your watch and your watch card.

And then he would initial it to see if he was on time.

And you best be on time, or you could have a train wreck.

The lanterns we have in the other room are from the all different railroads The valuable railroad lantern is the one that has the railroad's insignia on the lantern.

So you can get a lantern most any place and it would be a plain lantern, but if it had the railroad's emblem on it, like the Santa Fe, the Cotton Belt, the Missouri Pacific, or the Frisco or some other railroad that I see, even these things are more valuable in everything to the collectors.

We have lamps that actually were inside passenger cars 'cause we didn't have electricity.

It's an amazing place to be.

And we have lots of pictures to show you what all the equipment does.

Come on down to the Railroad Museum here at Pine Bluff.

You would be surprised what nice things we have in this museum.

So come on down and we're just south of Little Rock.

(light music)