Patrons at Atlanta museum will get engineer's view of restored locomotive Texas when exhibit opens in November

A view of the locomotive during an August tour

The steam locomotive Texas, a star of the Great Locomotive Chase and an emblem of Atlanta’s meteoric rebound after the Civil War, will be back on public display Nov. 17 for the first time in more than three years.

Patrons at the engine’s new home at the Atlanta History Center will enjoy a hands-on experience: They will be invited to step up to the cab and get the engineer’s view of the 1856 locomotive.

(All photographs by the Civil War Picket)

For the past 16 months, the Texas has been preening before motorists who glide past the history center on West Paces Ferry Road. The fastidiously restored engine, built for the Western & Atlantic Railroad, is lit up at night and rests in a new glass-fronted gallery that will lead patrons to the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama painting when it opens in February 2019.

Both artifacts were housed for more than 85 years in Grant Park, just south of downtown Atlanta. That building closed in summer 2015 after the city and the AHC announced the move of the treasures to the Buckhead neighborhood. The Texas arrived in May 2017 after getting a $500,000 makeover in Spencer, N.C.

The accompanying 1886 circular painting is undergoing a significant restoration in a new AHC wing that has a gallery connecting the Texas to cyclorama exhibits.

AHC officials announced last week that the Texas will be the cornerstone of “Locomotion: Railroads and the Making of Atlanta,” a permanent exhibition opening in November. They want to tell more than the story of its role in the Civil War, a switch from interpretation at Grant Park.

(Civil War Picket photos)

“The detailed exhibition accompanying the Texas will interpret the major role railroads played in transforming Atlanta into the transportation hub and commercial center it is today,” the AHC said in a press release. “The exhibition captures Atlanta's beginning, in 1837, when a surveyor drove a stake into the ground in a North Georgia forest previously inhabited by Native Americans. The stake marked the end point for the Western & Atlantic Railroad designed to run north to the Tennessee River near present-day Chattanooga.”

Texas will lead to cyclorama gallery

The new Rollins Gallery has the look of a railroad repair shop, with exposed steel girder columns and a brick wall.

While the Texas is most famous for running down a load of Union raiders and spies in April 1862, AHC officials have long stressed the engine tells a much larger story of the postwar growth of the city, and they decided to paint it in an 1886 scheme, rather than the bright colors it wore at Grant Park -- in part because its surviving parts date closer to that year than the Civil War.

Jim Wilke, a railroad historian in California who has done extensive research on locomotive and tender paint schemes, lauded the restoration of the Texas and the decision to interpret it two decades after the Civil War. "The parts of the engine that were original and running around in Georgia in the 1860s you could put in the back of a pickup truck."

Like the locomotive General, the object of the chase, the Texas was saved (in 1907) from the scrap heap. The General presides at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Marietta, Ga. The Texas and General are the sole surviving locomotives of the Western & Atlantic, which played a large part in Atlanta’s early development.

“The Texas locomotive symbolizes Atlanta’s longtime relationship with railroads and the city’s importance as a hub for people, commerce, and ideas. No artifact can be more important for telling Atlanta’s origin story than this Western & Atlantic locomotive,” AHC CEO Sheffield Hale said in a statement.

New Jersey locomotive maker Danforth, Cooke & Co. manufactured the Texas in the 4-4-0 design (4 leading wheels, 4 driving wheels and 0 trailing wheels).

Wilke told the Picket that the engine is one of a few remaining from the 1850s and helps tell the evolution of American railroads. By the time the Texas was retired, it was dwarfed by larger and more powerful locomotives, he said. "This change was happening all over the nation."

(Civil War Picket photos)

The exhibit will include a circa 1900 waiting room bench, signage from a 1949 Pullman sleeping car, a 1940s operating signal from Atlanta’s Terminal Station, gate signs and Western Union telegraph signage and clocks.

Patrons also will learn about the experience of working on the railroad, segregation on the rails and the science and mechanics of a steam locomotive, the AHC said.