Snoqualmie’s 78th annual Railroad Days will have a parade, food, games, and music, but it will also honor Richard Anderson, the executive director of the Northwest Railway Museum, as its Grand Marshal.

The Railroad Days committee selected Anderson to be the Grand Marshal this year due to all of the large developments he has worked on in the past year for the museum.

Projects started or finished on Richard Anderson’s watch as curator, then executive director of the Northwest Railway Museum in the past 22 years include:

The preservation and restoration of many train engines and carriages;

Construction of the Train Shed in 2005;

Construction of the Conservation and Restoration Center in 2011;

Construction of the Railway Education Center, opening in October;

Ongoing efforts to restore the museum’s steam engines, the former Northern Pacific Railway locomotive 924 and the Baldwin Locomotive Works’ “10-wheeler” locomotive 14; and

Fundraising for all of the above.

The big project for 2016 is the construction of the Railway Education Center which began earlier this year and will be a new stop on future train rides in the Valley. A ribbon cutting on the new facility is slated for October of this year.

Anderson has been involved with Railroad Days since the late ’90s, but these days, he doesn’t work on the festival at all.

With construction plans ramping up after last year’s festival, Anderson and Peggy Barchi, the museum’s marketing director and previous organizer of Railroad Days, agreed that they couldn’t dedicate the time to running the event. They were able to find Paul Timmerman, a volunteer at the museum, to lead event organization this year.

“It’s been over the top busy, construction is very disruptive, we’ve had construction underway since March,” Anderson said. “Paul came forward, he’s helped this event move forward and brought in a lot of good, new ideas. He’s simplified the ways we’ve organized the event.”

Anderson detailed the history of the event, explaining that the purpose and organizations that have run Railroad Days have vastly changed over the years.

“It was originally started by the volunteer fire department to raise money for equipment. Later it was run officially by the community, later still, there was a state non-profit put together to run the festival,” he said.

The Northwest Railway Museum has been running the event since 2010, Anderson said. A committee made up of people from the community organize the event and the museum itself acts as financial management and oversight.

Anderson has been with the museum for 22 years, starting in 1999. As the first official full-time employee of the museum, he briefly worked as a curator before becoming the executive director.

He spent his first few years working on planning and handling the impacts of city development, which included the construction of the Snoqualmie Parkway.

“Since then I’ve done a combination of programming and development work, working on new facilities and finding funding sources,” he said. “I’ve been involved in a number of notable projects including the (restoration of the 1898 Messenger of Peace) chapel car.

“I learned about that in 2007 and we accepted it as a donation and moved it to the museum and nominated it to the National Register (of Historic Places) and did all that over the period of the last few years. Then in 2011 we did a full restoration of it.”

As Grand Marshal, Anderson will be featured in the Railroad Days parade at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 20 on Railroad Avenue.