Dear Pilot,
My guides are quite amused to hear of how interested your steam engines are in our coal mine exhibit. They’re – we’re – very proud of it, as it was the model for how every exhibit should let people directly experience the thing it’s about. It makes industry more exciting.
It’s great that your museum makes us exciting that way too. The idea of a museum just for trains is unusual when you think about it. Your museum is an entirely new idea about how to display things too, just like the Deutsches Museum was. But it’s better this way, isn’t it? We’re not too delicate to let the visitors come inside and look still. We let them tour my cab here too, as well as my cars. That’s the way trains are best experienced outside of actually riding in them. 999 and 2903 have stairs to let the visitors up into their cabs too. Your museum’s founders – being railroaders themselves – knew exactly how we ought to be shown to people, I expect, because that’s how they would want to see us in a museum.
Our museums are really very similar, despite being very different places at first glance. You even have cultural festivals there like we do. We hosted one about Poland last month. And we have antique automobiles too! Actually, we have an entire exhibit about automobiles: Motorama. The antique autos are part of a different exhibit though. Yesterday’s Main Street is a replica of a typical American main street from fifty years ago. The guides say that our old autos are quite chatty indeed and put a lot of historic flavor on that stretch of cobblestone!
I don’t have much experience with cars, aside from the times I crashed into trucks. For the most part, cars only ever seemed interested in racing me. The guides say though that automobiles tend keep to themselves because it’s safer for everyone that way. We have our drivers who have years of experience driving us and we’re on tracks so we tend not to do unpredictable things. Not so for cars: their drivers might be new or going blind or ill or just scatterbrained and if they’re not, the drivers of others cars might be. All that together and it’s a lot easier for mistakes to happen and for a car to be somewhere he’s not supposed to be. There’s a lot more things to consider as a car, so my guides say they tend to be quieter so as not to be distracting, not because they’re antisocial. I am assured that people still know a car has a personality though and people get just as attached to them as they do to us.
U-505 thought very hard about your question to him before he answered. It turned into a much longer conversation, which I am simplifying for him here because it wouldn’t all fit in the envelope otherwise.
It makes him think of how, when all the German companies made new parts for him and sent them overseas for free, it was because they wanted him to be a credit to German technology. It is of some relief to him to have a larger purpose in his disposition beyond his part in losing the war. Machines made for war, he says, understand that their ultimate goal is peace but that they will not be needed if it is achieved. Knowing this, it would have been honorable to have been scrapped after the war, even having been on the losing side. He is here though, not strictly because he was captured, but because our museum so admired a museum in Germany and wanted everything it had to offer for their own. So then, if he was not to be scrapped as he would have expected, it is some consolation to be in our yard with us because our countries were allies before the war and now are again.
He is also – perhaps for the first time – thankful that our museum only cut doorways into his portside to allow for his tours. He’s always been a bit mournful over not being seaworthy anymore, but it’s harder to feel sorry for yourself knowing that the Deutsches Museum’s submarine is cut completely in half!
But you can only look at a submarine that way. Our visitors experience our submarine.
As to my experience with the Century of Progress run, I wasn’t nervous before that run because everyone was so certain I could do it. I’ll admit, I did start to get a little worried during the run when things kept going wrong. Anytime my speed would dip though, my crew were on top of the problem and set it right. I rolled into the World’s Fair in record time and if I ever doubted I could do it, my crew never once did.
It’s great news to hear your volunteers expect you to be running again! By the time this reaches you, you’ll already know whether you’re operational again. It feels a little silly to say whether you should be nervous beforehand when I know you won’t be able to read it until after.
But I can say this: the Century of Progress was incredibly important not only in my own history but to that of my museum and so many of its other exhibits. But when I was actually racing to get there and after I arrived?
The Century of Progress was just the first of so many important events in my revenue service. It is my hope that your Member’s Day run will be the first of many more in yours.
Your friend,
Pioneer