Much of the growth of the United States happened because of the railroads.

Another example of the American inventive mind and business enterprise working to provide America with the greatest transportation system in the world.

If you could stop and think about in the late eighteen hundreds.

Really the only way you could travel was either by horse, buggy, wagon or the river.

That's what kept the country from developing faster, depending on riverboat few roads and canals.

These weren't enough.

It was just very limited in how travl.

Once the Transcontinental Railroad went in, it opened up a whole new frontier to be settled.

Iowa, you know, at one time was the fourth largest state in terms of railroad track mileage.

No one was no more than 12 miles away from a railroad.

That's how predominant railroads were in Iowa.

Are used for different purposes, like your smaller locomotive to be use in a rail yard somewhere, and they can use that to just move cars around or put trains together and or even like factories and stuff like that.

This site is very rare.

This is the only one that's being preserved, a steam railroad repair shop complex.

Like I've said before, it's not going to be glass and marble, well polished floors.

You're you're experiencing the site as it was for the worker, right down to the cobwebs.

It is just the enjoyment of seeing people leave this place with a better knowledge of the history and the education of this site.

We've had a lot of depots that have survived and they're being restored.

But there was a whole world or industry that existed within the railroad, the thousands who work together, who are bound together in one effort to serve the public with better freight and passenger transportation.

So it's very unique.

And the stories within these four walls these four corners is what makes us unparalleled elsewhere.

Sometimes I would just gaze around the station and wonder about the other stories.

What adventures might these people be on?

So when I heard stories about folks who were train-hoppers and got a job just by showing up in a town, I thought, why not?

I can never let go of the research because I find a st behind this place.

Don't tell me you're here to get in my way playing with that radio again.

I wanted to bring that to life.

The best part of the job was the people.

And we came up with the idea, let's do a living history, and create characters that take those elements that we were uncovering in the stories and tales and put them into a character.

So you let them know that P.B.

sent you.

Well, the storytellers are a unique and unusual way to communicate the story of the Milwaukee railroad in Sioux land and its impact on this community.

I tell people I am the eyes and ears of the train dispatcher.

So there are many jobs that are associated with the railroad.

And when I was approached to write the story, I got to thinking about, well, what jobs would I want to illustrate so that individuals who came out here would then better understand the railroad itself .

And then my challenge was to take what she had written and find props that would support those ideas in those different time periods.

And of course, that was a lot of fun.

I don't have time to constantly be going back and forth between that and the federal radio.

My character's name is Alex Brown, and she is a radio operator.

I am Louis Timmons, the telegraph operator from the 1940s.

So if you know anything about the railroad, you know that things must operate efficiently.

You have a great deal of flexibility.

I'm sure as the history books record this, it will in the millions.

My character is actually a real person.

It's P.B.

Miller, who was the accountant at the railroad.

And we're actually talking about an occurrence that really happened with the fire.

You can go around a museum and you can see the pictures and you can read all the little bios.

We clicked and the rest is history.

But by being an actual character, the people can engage with them, and it's a little easier, especially for children to relate to museum, as it were, with live characters.

And please enjoy the rest of your visit.

Stories are just really the stepping off point to helping us realize that these places were workplaces and they were people, places.

It is a railroad built by people and operated by people.

For the service of people.