The Candelaria Fund of Little River, CA has awarded a grant of $200,000 towards the building of an addition to the Bay Area Electric Railway Archives at the Western Railway Museum.
The new structure, which will double the temperature and humidity controlled storage space, will be added to the existing archives and will be an important part of preserving the history and stories of electric railroads in the western US.
Curator Allan Fisher believes this gift, when matched by other donors and friends of the museum, will allow construction to start later on this year. “Donations to our archives have continued to grow each year, and we are quickly running out of space for these wonderful collections.” Currently the archives has over one million items, including negatives, slides, movies, drawings, employee timetables, documents and other ephemera which have been given since the first donation to the archives in the mid 1980s. Last year 80 donations were received, and over 30 volunteer archivists have able to catalog 200,000 items (100,000 of which have been digitized to date).
We are extremely grateful to the Candelaria Fund for recognizing the importance of helping to preserve rail history and provide a world class facility for present and future researchers.
The lead architect for this project is Rob Henley A1A of A2R of Vacaville, California.
Long time volunteer Ron Hook has donated $75,000 towards an extension to our nearly-full archives building! Our historic archives is quickly overgrowing its current space, so he is encouraging everyone to collectively match his donation so a new extension can be built ASAP!
