Although it takes less than 30 minutes today on an electric-powered railroad train, the journey of trains pulled by a coal-powered locomotive between Jerusalem and Jaffa, and back, took a sluggish and exasperating three and a half hours.
However, the railroad car that has settled at Jerusalem’s Bloomfield Science Museum is not going anywhere. Built in Birmingham, England, in 1922 by a company that also manufactured horse-drawn carriages, the hefty, brown-painted railcar is going to remain permanently on the site near the Israel Museum and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Givat Ram campus.
It used to be at the Old Railway Station in the capital’s Baka neighborhood, where it contained a modest miniature railroad scene inside. Then it was donated to the Bloomfield Science Museum by the Jerusalem Municipality. Months ago, in the middle of the night, traffic between the two sites was halted so that the railcar could be transported and installed at the edge of the museum, with the help of a long crane.
Restoring a delicate train
Railroad-loving staffers spent many months renovating the inside, ordering delicate parts, and creating dioramas with a miniature track, where eight trains run simultaneously under artificial hills and forests and past a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, tiny children on a seesaw, homes, factories, and more. The scenes, created at a cost of some NIS 200,00, are wondrous.
During the tour of the exhibition, visitors experience the challenges faced by the train: traveling with enormous weights, accelerating, stopping, turning, and climbing – in an experiential and experimental way. Visitors walk among the dioramas and electric trains and look for clues to the history and experiences of the railway.
The original wooden floor remains, as does part of the blotched, beige-and-green interior wall. The wheels have a round disk on them marked “PR,” short for “Palestine Railways,” which existed during the British Mandate of then-Palestine. The company had ordered eight other railcars from the British firm for the Jerusalem-to-Jaffa line, which had been running since 1892.
The museum launched a new event during Sukkot, transforming the area into a giant train complex. Families and children embarked on a journey through time with a real 103-year-old train car.
It was accompanied by the play Grandparents’ Gift Train, in which the seniors began a journey with surprising gifts for each grandchild, but the train is delayed. What is hidden in the colorful boxes? Will they manage to arrive on time? The imaginative performance – featuring puppets, live songs, and lots of surprises – was an exciting experience for children and the whole family.
The exhibition also included a train station construction workshop where children could play, build, use their imaginations, and create their own worlds with colorful toy trains and diverse wooden parts, invent tracks, bridges, and tunnels.
In the main hall, museum visitors can watch a miniature underground train speeding under the floor and passing under the transparent glass floor tiles or through a screen that films its underground activity.