Northwest Railway Museum’s tedious restoration of a 1901 parlor car

From 1940 to 2017, Whidbey Island was home to a railcar that acted as a beach cottage.

Today, that car is under the care of the Northwest Railway Museum in Snoqualmie and will eventually be ready to hit the tracks once again.

The car, called parlor car 1049, has a long history. It was originally crafted in 1901 for the Northern Pacific Railway, an important railroad that connected Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest.

The interior was spacious and open, with only 28 high-back swivel chairs. The chairs, along with matching benches, were covered in a deep green mohair with a woven pattern called star frieze.

About 10 years later, 1049 was moved to Seattle and used for first-class seating for day trips on the North Coast Limited, which traveled between Seattle and either Yakima or Spokane.

In 1939, the 1049 was retired, and in 1940, a former railroad worker purchased the car and moved it to Whidbey Island by barge. He proceeded to strip it of its wheels, plop it on the beach and live in it as a cottage, where it remained for many years.

In 2017, the family that owned it decided it was not feasible to maintain as a beach house, so they donated it to the Northwest Railway Museum under one condition: the museum had to get it from Whidbey Island to Snoqualmie.

The museum first moved 1049 to the mainland by barge and then, because the car couldn’t support itself, moved it to Snoqualmie using the kind of dollies used to move houses. At something like 18 feet wide and 90 feet long, it traveled down I-90 in the middle of the night so it could more easily take up multiple lanes.

The move alone cost over $100,000 and, so far, the museum has invested more than $400,000 into restoring 1049, said the museum’s Executive Director Richard Anderson

“The thing that’s sort of surprising is how complete it was, yet upon taking it apart to work on it, the overall condition was not very good,” he said. “There’s been a lot of deterioration that has taken place over the years as water crept into different parts of the car body.”

Most recently, the museum received a $7,500 grant from the John H. Emery Rail Heritage Trust that will allow the museum to begin work on the ceilings of the car.

“It won’t allow us to finish the ceilings, but it should allow us to get started and demonstrate the intent of what we’re doing,” to support future grant opportunities, Anderson said.

It’s impossible to say how much it will cost to restore the car in the end, Anderson said, simply due to the nature of restorative work. Until they take the car apart, they won’t really know what all needs to be done. Along the way, they find that some things can be repaired, while others need to be replaced entirely.

Much of the interior remains surprisingly intact, Anderson said, like a section of ceiling that has its original painting. Anderson said they will likely remove that section, replicating it and putting the original in museum storage so as to not cause future damage to it.

But they are missing two windows, the glasswork of which is no longer done. There is also no one these days who does the chairs’ weaving or makes the train’s window shades, a few of which are missing.

Lead collection technician Glenn Warmack is behind much of 1049’s restoration so far. He intends to restore or replace each piece of the car to its original state.

“We’re not trying to build a better railcar because they already did that in all the different stages,” he said. “We’re trying to build this railcar, which means we’re going to use the machinery they used, if we can find it, the techniques they used, if we can.”

The all-wood train was built in a time of early manufacturing, Warmack said, which means even the mass-produced pieces still had to be fit by hand, as will the replacements.

“Labor intensiveness was just built into this all along,” he said. “The scale of that, I think, is what a lot of people don’t immediately appreciate about this, is how labor intensive just about everything was.”

That commitment to preservation can seem intimidating, Warmack said, but he enjoys it. For a lot of information, he uses the car builder’s dictionaries — a series of manuals on railcar building and maintenance — but those can only tell so much, he said.

“As a craftsperson, there are things that I can learn from this car that nobody could tell me,” he said. “It’s almost like an archaeological aspect of it, rediscovering how it was done.”

For example, Warmack said, there are old black and white photos of the railcar that show the pattern of the ceiling, but uncovering it has allowed him to see what colors the paint are — and, even more than that, to learn what type of paint was used.

“There’s a spot that was a little bit below the edge of where the trim went, and you can actually see brush strokes,” he said. “Things we can only guess about what was the viscosity of this when they were applying it, you can tell that from a brush stroke. It gives you information you’re not going to get anywhere else.”

Replicating the car’s original work will be at least as labor-intensive as creating it, but it will be worth it.

When restoration is complete, 1049 will go in the museum’s Train Shed Exhibit Hall where guests can visit it, with informational audio and visual panels. Anderson said he hopes the car will live in the museum’s new exhibit hall, a construction project that is in the very early stages.

The restoration will also allow 1049 to be put on the rails for certain special events.

“The big thing here is just the level of work that’s required to restore an artifact like this,” Anderson said. “There’s very few places in the country that do this kind of work. … Doing this scale of work on a wooden car is very rare.”

Northwest Railway Museum Executive Director Richard Anderson points to an original piece of ceiling in parlor car 1049, April 29, 2025. (Grace Gorenflo/Valley Record)