National Railroad Museum

The National Railroad Museum occupies 33 acres on Cooke Memorial Park along the west bank of the Fox River in Ashwaubenon, a suburb immediately south of downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was established in 1956 by a group of local businessmen who formed a Steam Locomotive Committee to preserve a favourite steam locomotive and other rolling stock. At the same time General Carl R. Gray, who commanded military railroads during the Second World War, was advocating for a national railroad museum. Two years later, a joint resolution of Congress — driven by U.S. Representative John Byrnes and Senator Alexander Wiley — recognised the Green Bay institution as the National Railroad Museum, making it the only Congressionally designated railroad museum in the country. It has operated as a privately funded 501(c)(3) organisation since 1958 and receives no federal, state or local tax support.

The collection now runs to more than 70 pieces of rolling stock and over 100,000 small artifacts. The rarest and most fragile pieces live indoors in the climate-controlled Frederick J. Lenfestey Center, while others stand outside under the roof of the Victor McCormick Train Pavilion or in the open air. A standard gauge track rings the grounds, and an 80-foot (24 m) wooden observation tower gives views over the Fox River and Green Bay. The museum's archives hold corporate records, annual reports, maps, mechanical and engineering drawings, oral histories and ephemera from railroad companies, labour unions and fraternal organisations; the photograph collection runs to 15,000 prints, slides and negatives of U.S. railroading since 1890.

The site changed substantially in 2025. A $17 million Fox River Expansion — the first of four planned phases, roughly ten years in the making and supported by $7 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds contributed by the state of Wisconsin — opened on 20 September 2025. The glass-walled exhibit hall faces the river, houses several historic cars on tracks, and was designed with education in mind: museum director Jacqueline Frank has said roughly two-thirds of visitors are children, and the building can accommodate 200 schoolchildren touring at once. Annual attendance is over 100,000, served by museum staff and more than 200 volunteers.

The Lenfestey Center is the best photographic asset here: Big Boy 4017 and the A4 Eisenhower are indoors, lit and shootable regardless of weather, which is unusual for locomotives of this size. Indoor light is mixed and uneven — a fast lens or a high ISO is more useful than a tripod in a busy hall. The Big Boy's sheer length rewards a wide angle from the front quarter; the A4's streamlined casing reads better in a tighter side-on frame that isolates the curve.

The new Fox River Expansion, opened in September 2025, is glass-walled specifically so daylight falls on the cars inside and the river shows behind them. Late afternoon and the hour before closing give the warmest light through that glass, and the museum has published sunset images of the space. Outdoors, the McCormick Pavilion and open-air track give clean full-side elevations of freight equipment, cabooses and maintenance-of-way pieces without the interior clutter.

The 80-foot (24 m) wooden observation tower on the grounds is the one elevated vantage point, looking out over the Fox River and Green Bay. The seasonal train ride, running May through September and October weekends, puts you trackside along the river shoreline for a perspective on the grounds you cannot get on foot. The museum explicitly encourages visitors to bring a camera or smartphone, and note that by entering you consent to being photographed or filmed by the museum. Personal photography sessions on the grounds are handled as a separate bookable private-event category.

Two locomotives make this museum a genuine pilgrimage rather than a regional stop. Union Pacific 4017, a 4-8-8-4 "Big Boy" built by Alco in December 1944, is one of eight Big Boys Union Pacific donated to museums and one of only two preserved indoors. It weighs 1.1 million pounds and measures nearly half a football field in length. Its 14-wheel tender was among the largest ever built, carrying 24,000 gallons of water and — after Union Pacific added steel coal boards around the bunker — 32 tons of coal, up from the 28 tons it was designed for. That load was enough to work a 3,600-ton train over the 55 mountainous miles between Ogden and Echo, Utah. Seeing a Big Boy under a roof, lit and approachable rather than weathering in a park, is a distinctly different experience from the outdoor survivors.

The second is British Railways Class A4 No. 60008 Dwight D. Eisenhower, built at Doncaster Works in 1937 as LNER No. 4496 Golden Shuttle and renamed for the Supreme Allied Commander after the war. It is the only A4 in the United States and the only British passenger locomotive in the collection. It arrived in Green Bay on Memorial Day 1964, and Eisenhower himself visited that September. In 2012 the museum loaned it to the National Railway Museum in York for the 2013 "Great Gathering" of A4s; York carried out a cosmetic restoration as part of the loan agreement and the locomotive returned to Green Bay in June 2014. Coupled behind it are LNER teak sleepers 1591 and 1592, converted for Eisenhower's use during the war — 1591 restored to its post-war donation appearance, 1592 complete with armour plating as it looked in wartime. All three sit in the Lenfestey Center.

Beyond those two, the roster rewards a slow walk. Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe 5017, a 5011-class 2-10-4 built by Baldwin in July 1944, is the second largest locomotive on site. Chesapeake and Ohio 2736 is a K-4 2-8-4 built by Alco in 1944, one of twelve preserved. Lake Superior and Ishpeming 24, an Alco 2-8-0 of 1910, is the oldest locomotive in the collection. Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 No. 4890 represents the great electric era, and one of only two surviving General Motors Aerotrain sets — the Rock Island trainset with its power car and two cars — stands as a monument to 1950s streamlining that did not work out. The Bauer Drumhead Gallery, built on over three dozen drumheads donated by Frederick Bauer in 1999, holds one of the rarest categories of railroad memorabilia; most were scrapped along with the observation cars they hung on.

Plan on two to three hours. The museum is a mix of indoor halls and outdoor display track, so the experience shifts with the weather and the season. The Lenfestey Center, Fuller Hall and Bauer Hall are temperature-controlled; the McCormick Pavilion is roofed but open to the air, and a good share of the rolling stock stands entirely outside. Dress for the forecast — this is northeastern Wisconsin, and winter here is not nominal.

The crowd skews strongly toward families with children rather than dedicated railfans, which is a deliberate result of a programming shift the museum made after realising two-thirds of its visitors were children. The Children's Discovery Depot, the theatre presentations and the summer train ride are all built around that audience. For a railfan this mostly means the halls are livelier than a hushed archive and that midweek mornings outside school-trip season are calmer than weekend afternoons. Note that the Discovery Depot can close during special events such as The Polar Express and The Great Pumpkin Train — call (920) 437-7623 ahead if it matters to your visit.

From May through 30 September the museum runs a diesel-hauled train ride daily, weekends only in October, and none from November through April. The ride lasts about 25 minutes and covers two miles — two loops of a one-mile circuit through wooded ground, along the Fox River shoreline and past museum property — while the conductor talks through the rolling stock, railroad safety and hobo culture. It costs $6 per person on top of admission. Two theatre films run daily: "Last of the Giants" on the Big Boy locomotives, and "A Brief History of Railroad Snowplows" produced by board member Brian Buchanan. Many cars have ramps or stairs that let visitors look inside from a level platform, and most educational programming is deliberately staged outside the cars, since equipment built before the ADA is difficult to enter.