Dan Gross/The Gazette Workers prepare to move an historic passenger car from 1951 known as a "Budd Car" up onto the train tracks next to the Gaithersburg Community Museum in Olde Towne Gaithersburg. The 8,000-square-foot train car will be a part of a new museum exhibit.

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Dan Gross/The Gazette Workers prepare to move an historic passenger car from 1951 known as a "Budd Car" up onto the train tracks next to the Gaithersburg Community Museum in Olde Towne Gaithersburg. The 8,000 square-foot train car will be a part of a new museum exhibit.

Dan Gross/The Gazette Workers prepare to move an historic passenger car from 1951 known as a "Budd Car" up onto the train tracks next to the Gaithersburg Community Museum in Olde Towne Gaithersburg. The 8,000-square-foot train car will be a part of a new museum exhibit.

 

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A piece of Gaithersburg history rolled into the city early Friday.

A Budd car, a passenger rail car that once ran through Gaithersburg on the B&O Railroad in the 1950s and ‘60s, has made its final stop at the Gaithersburg Community Museum, where it will soon welcome visitors aboard to view the newest exhibit in Rolling Stock Park near Summit and Diamond avenues.

The 85-foot, 8,000-square-foot car left the B&O Railroad Museum’s facility in Baltimore, where it has been restored over the last six months, at 11:30 p.m. Thursday.

It was pulled by a truck, on road dollies, into the city around 4 a.m. At around 7:30 a.m., city staff came onsite as contractors begin to use a pneumatic jacks rail car, which weighs between an estimated 46 tons and 60 tons. As of 11:30 a.m., the train still hadn’t fully been lowered onto the tracks.

The arrival of the car marks an end of a plan that has taken Gaithersburg more than five years to complete.

The city developed a partnership with the Roundhouse Museum in Hagerstown, swapping a 1940 troop kitchen car and a 1942 B&O Railroad ‘‘Wagontop” Bay-Window Caboose that were once in Olde Towne for Hagerstown’s 1980 C&O Bay-Window Caboose, which was delivered to the city in 2009. Hagerstown was also going to give Gaithersburg a Budd car, but because it was in such a poor condition, the city chose to partner with the B&O Museum, which gave the city a car that they received as a donation from the state, according to Denise Kayser, the city’s cultural arts director.

The state provided a matching grant of $250,000 to the city for the restoration of the car.

To restore the car, Baltimore-based Worcester Eisenbrandt was awarded a contract in July for $356,000 with an additional $35,000 in contingency funding.

The Budd car Gaithersburg gained was relevant, and therefore meaningful, to the city’s past, Kayser said.

The Budd Company, which was based in Philadelphia, built about 400 of the cars for the B&O Railroad between 1949 and 1962, she said.

The Budd cars, which fit about 70 to 80 passengers each, had two self-propelled diesel engines that allowed them to run on the rail like a trolley, said Dave Shackelford, chief curator of the B&O Museum, who led the restoration project. Eventually, some became cars on MARC trains, which frequently ran through Gaithersburg, up until about the 1990s, he said.

The restoration took a lot of work — there was graffiti on the outside and the train had been in a fire caused by an oil spill, Shackelford said.

When the exhibit opens in the spring, it will have an open room near where the engines were, a place for visitors to watch historical movies about the railroad and Gaithersburg, archives for guests to research historical facts and genealogy, and a place to explore where the engineer sat.

jbondeson@gazette.net