He worked in the aerospace industry, but he played in the historical world of trains. The memory of longtime Valley resident and Northwest Railway Museum volunteer Bill Walker will be celebrated this Saturday with a free showing of his documentary films on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Pacific Railroad — Milwaukee Railroad for short — in the Snoqualmie Valley.

Walker, a retired aerospace engineer when he moved to North Bend in 1987, died in January of this year.

His daughter-in-law, Viola said, “we thought it would be a great way to honor his memory by showing these two films at the North Bend Theater for free to the public.”

Her father-in-law was a huge train fan, Viola said. When he moved to North Bend, he began meeting the people and discovering the places of the old Milwaukee line, which the Snoqualmie Valley Trail follows today.

After meeting a woman who had raised her family in a boxcar in the 30s and several ex-Milwaukee employees, including Cecil Geelhart and Allen Miller, he started working on a plan for the films he would spend more than four years making.

“He loved trains and enjoyed hearing stories about the local families who had worked for the Milwaukee Railroad on the Everett Line from Everett to North Bend,” Viola added. “He thought the stories were fascinating and wanted to record them.”

With grant funding from the Washington Commission for the Humanities, the Casey T. O’Neil Foundation of Minnesota, and King County, and support from local companies Wilderness Glass, Optiva, Sterling and the Whitaker Foundation, Walker was able to cover the $21,000 in production costs and create the films. The first, “Life Along the Tracks: The Milwaukee Railroad in the Snoqualmie Valley,” was completed in 2001. The Snoqualmie Valley Historical Society sponsored the project by handling the donations and providing support.

“After he finished this 30-minute film, he still had lots of interviews that were not included so he decided to make a second film to include those interviews as well,” Viola said.

The second film was called “The Milwaukee Everett Branch: Its People.”

Walker’s goal with the films, he said in a 2001 Valley Record interview, was to preserve the voices and images of the railroad’s working people as a historic legacy.

“That was their income, their dedicated life’s work,” he said.

As project director and researcher, Walker said he’s met many people who confuse the Milwaukee with Northern Pacific, which ran on the tracks that the Snoqualmie Valley Railroad Museum’s trains now travel. The tracks are different from those of the Milwaukee, which run along the river near Snoqualmie.

“I decided that their voice and their image should be preserved for future generations and to publicize their life stories,” he said.

He spent more than four years on research and interviewed 45 people for the two films.

The railroad was originally called the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul. At the turn of the century, railroad management decided to expand to the Northwest. Construction began in 1906 to form a track from the Midwest to Tacoma.

“The line was (a) superbly civil-engineered design,” Walker said. “It was an outstanding construction because it was the shortest distance from Chicago to Puget Sound and had the lowest track elevation compared with other transcontinental lines.”

The Snoqualmie tunnel was completed in 1915, and in 1920, “Pacific” was officially added to the railroad’s name.

For decades, the Milwaukee operated in competition with the Northern Pacific, which eventually became part of Burlington-Northern. Parts of the Milwaukee ran until March 1980, when its officials filed for bankruptcy. Its western lines were abandoned and the Soo Railroad later purchased its Midwest lines.

Today, the Milwaukee line can be traced via the Snoqualmie Valley Trail and the John Wayne Pioneer Trail, which runs from Cedar Falls to the Columbia River.

The line that’s now the Snoqualmie Valley Trail used to run to Everett, snakes from Cedar Falls to North Bend, past the Mount Si Golf Course to the Snoqualmie River, where the old steel railroad bridge still stands. The trail bypasses Weyerhaeuser property, picks up again at Tokul Creek and goes all the way to Duvall.

Saturday’s showing, like the original film’s debut, is free to the public. The shows start at 10 a.m. at North Bend Theatre.

“We just want as many people to come as possible,” said Viola.