“ History and old iron go together for me. — Randy Pirkle

back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pirkle said, when train metro area train buffs joined together to save an Atlantic and West Point Railway locomotive known as 290. “It was a great big steam engine used to pull the Southern Crescent from Atlanta to Montgomery,” Pirkle said. The engine, saved from the scrap heap, remains part of the museum’s collection. It even appeared in the movie “Fried Green Tomatoes.”

The museum operates primarily through efforts of volunteers, many of them retirees. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, Pirkle said. There are about 145 regular volunteers and, on any given weekend, there could be as many as 45 or so at work spread across the museum’s campus.

One recent Friday, volunteers Ken Birmingham and Cliff Smith were decked out in trainmen’s work clothes for their stints as volunteer conductors on the museum’s train ride. Smith, who’s 69 and said he’d liked trains “since I was a little kid,” wore jeans, a work shirt and a striped hat. Birmingham, who’s 75 and said he grew up across from the Long Island Railroad’s main line, wore a stiff-sided conductor’s hat.

What convinced them to spend their time at the museum on a hot June afternoon? “It’s just fun,” Birmingham said. “It’s just fun working with the kids,” Smith added.

Leo Schiltgen, who’s 70, volunteers as a conductor, too, and said he helps train other volunteers to do the job. But he also spends time restoring old train cars for the museum. He’s working now to replace wooden and tile flooring on a vintage Southern Railway dining car. He learned how to fix metal machines while he was working, Schiltgen said, and he likes working on train cars. “It’s just something I’m interested in,” he said. “I’ve learned the skills. I might as well use them for somebody’s benefit.”

As the museum and its volunteers keep the big stock rolling, they also help preserve important links to Atlanta’s past as a train town. The museum helped put together a photo history book, called “When Atlanta Took The Train,” that shows how the city grew up around railroads.

“Atlanta is a child of the railroads,” Pirkle said. “It’s important to get people to see that. It’s very difficult to do that because Atlanta has been very successful in wiping out its own past. There’re virtually no downtown railway stations left because progress got in the way.”

Southeastern Railway Museum

3595 Buford Hwy., Duluth 30096

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays in June and July; Wednesdays through Saturdays, March through May and August through December; and Thursdays through Saturdays, January and February.

Tickets: $8 for seniors (65+), $10 for adults, $7 for children aged 2-12. Train rides: $3 for big train, $3 for miniature train, $5 for both.

Info: 770-476-2013, train-museum.org