The Union Pacific Museum and Archives

摘要

Most corporations only acknowledge their history when it can help them sell more products. Some even seek to weaken their ties to the past by giving themselves trendy new names, usually featuring an "X" or a "One." Very few maintain their own museums, and those that do—breweries, for example—often make them subsidiaries of the marketing department. The Union Pacific Railroad has chosen a different route. Its name is intertwined with the history of the United States. What textbook does not devote at least a paragraph to the transcontinental railroad and the meeting of east and west at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869? The Union Pacific maintains not one but two full-size steam locomotives from the 1940s in operating condition, and regularly runs them for trips and excursions. Since 1921 it has kept a small museum open to the public in its Omaha headquarters. When the building was expanded in the mid-1990s the railroad moved some items to the Durham Western Heritage Museum, located in Omaha's former Union Station, but most were placed in storage. Now a new museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa, provides ample space for the display and interpretation of the collection.