Crew works through delays to renovate Silver Horizon rail car

Renovations are continuing on one of Maricopa’s most visible historical landmarks, the Silver Horizon rail car located in the Heritage District. While progress is being made, the car still has about a year’s worth of work before it will be ready for public visits, according to Maricopa Historical Society board member Dorothy Charles.

“The target opening was three years ago,” she said with a laugh. “But with COVID and so many other things that have happened, things kept getting pushed back. The holdup now will be the air conditioning, because it gets up to about 120 degrees or more in the car and people can’t work in there without it – it’s covered with stainless steel.”

The current project includes cleaning the exterior of the car and replacing the windows.

“We’re replacing all the windows because the originals were all fogged up because they are 70-some years old,” said volunteer Kent Charles. “We ran into a problem doing the replacement because of COVID – they were going to put FRA glass (safety glass similar to windshield glass but designed specifically for trains), which is like bulletproof glass, back into these windows, but it would have been prohibitively expensive.”

The company doing the renovation, Wasatch Railroad Contractors of Cheyenne, Wyo., proposed installing plastic windows to keep costs down, yet provide excellent aesthetics. But when COVID hit in 2020, the market for plastic dried up, as all available materials were being used for barriers and partitions. That has led to more than two years of delays.

Dorothy Charles laid out what the next steps in the renovation project.

“The windows were just horrid,” Dorothy Charles said. “John (Rimmasch, the Wasatch CEO) replaced the windows, so we’ve got nice clear windows, not all fuzzy and cracked with bullet holes and everything. We’re cleaning the car now, then hopefully within the next month we’ll have air conditioning so we can get to the inside which is a complete mess.

“We’ll get that cleaned up we’ll have the air conditioning done, and we’ll probably have a couple of public openings so people can see the interior of the train then. Then we’ll do some recarpeting and bringing in displays.”

She said the Maricopa Historical Society is trying to use local contractors for as much of the work as possible, and the local tradesmen have been receptive. “We’ve talked to quite a few people around town, and they are very interested in helping us get this thing going.”

Paul Shirk, the President of the Historical Society, said one of the attractions inside the Silver Horizon will be a working model railroad of the city of Chicago’s rail system, including the railroad yard and elevated trains, as well as landmarks like Wrigley Field and Union Station.

“We’re not about stuffy history,” Shirk said. “We want to have fun with it.”

The Silver Horizon is one of just seven domed observation cars on the legendary California Zephyr train that ran between Chicago and San Francisco from 1949-70.