North Carolina Transportation Museum

Cheerwine is based right here in Salisbury NC, home of  the museum. 

We recently visited the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer NC, and had a good time checking out their collection of mostly cars and trains. The museum is on the site of a Southern Railway repair facility, and includes the largest remaining roundhouse in North America. If you're interested in trains at all, I'd say it's worth checking out the facility, which also contains some cool train cars of various types. You can walk through a few of the cars, like a restored Army medical train car, a mail car, and look into a very fancy personalized car built by the Pullman company for a rich client. 

This photo doesn't give you the feel of this railroad repair building, it's GIGANTIC. 
You could easily put a football field in here, because it's two football fields long. 

There is also a train depot that was brought in from not too far away, and the museum offers train rides when they are open. Another interesting part of the roundhouse was an active repair shop, where I think they still refurbish and maintain train cars in the museum. 

Train repair Roundhouse and turntable.

Army medical train car, as used in the Korean War.

Roundhouse repair shop. About half of the Roundhouse was open. 

Like some auto shops, the Roundhouse train tracks had pits where you could work underneath the trains. 

Automobile wise, there is one building that has some interesting cars on display, as well as a HUGE train repair building that was crammed full of trains, planes, and automobiles. I'm sure you could fit a football field or two inside this building, since it looked to have 3 train tracks running through it, where train cars could be brought inside for repairs. I'm not a train geek or expert, so it was an impressive building that gave you a bit of a feel for how much work went into all the mechanical parts of keeping trains running. 

1918 electric car! The front end with no air intake looks similar to today's electric cars. 

1955 Nash Ambassador Custom, styled by Italian firm Farina, now known as Pininfarina.
For many years the Ambassador was the top of the line model for Nash.  

Nash hubcap

Here's an Edsel, the line of Ford cars named for the son of founder Henry Ford. Pretty much considered a big failure, the Edsel line didn't last long, just 1958-1960. 

1959 Studebaker

Here's a 1961 rear engine Chevrolet Corvair Rampside.

To finish our visit to the museum, this automobile train transporter was very cool. The description said that early days rail flat cars could only carry 3-4 cars. To meet the demands of car production after WWII, the railway industry developed two level, and then three level train cars to carry more autos. The triple level train cars could carry 12 automobiles. TO make them resistant to damage and theft, these train cars were then built totally covered. 

But, this train car is even more special than that. In 1973, the Southern Railway and Greenville Steel Car Company built just TWO of these, tri-level articulated three-unit rail cars. With three-unit design, this could carry 18 cars, instead of only 12. This is the only one of these train cars in existence. 
You can tell that a third level was added onto the standard two level train above and below. 

If you need to carry a lot of cars at once!