Moon Glow is dimming to nothing

Moon Glow in 2018

One of my self-appointed jobs at Union Station has been to occasionally document the state of the museum's and city's rail cars stored at Ogden Business Depot.

There's some real history out there which, sadly, is being horribly neglected.

There is a couple of wood Saltaire excursion cars slowly moldering away to kindling. The shell of a Bamberger inter-urban rail car that once ran from Ogden to Salt Lake City is rusting away.

Saltaire Excursion Car

But most sad of all, Moon Glow is pretty much done for.

Not that that's anyone's fault.  In the world of historic preservation, triage has to take place: You save what you can.  What you can't save, gets lost. Money is always the key, and saving these things takes a lot of it.

In 2012, when I still worked at the Standard-Examiner, I did a story on the status of the one surviving remnant of the Train Of Tomorrow.  You can read it here (click!). The elevator version is that Moon Glow was one of four cars built by the Union Pacific Railroad to show travelers in the US how amazing rail passenger life was going to be after World War II.

Just one problem: Automobiles.

Americans were increasingly buying and driving them, to the detriment of rails everywhere. As early as the 1920s Ogden's trolly car system was facing stiff competition, and losing. Why take a train when you can drive?

Things got worse in the 1950s. President Eisenhower admired Germany's Autobahn highways so much that he felt the US should have the same thing. Interstate highways were for defense, allegedly, and funded that way, but car drivers loved them.

So the Train of Tomorrow toured the nation in1947, amazed everyone, and then went away. GE, which built it, had trouble even selling it to a major railroad.  UP finally bought it, but it never achieved the nation glory it was aimed at.

Most of the Train of Tomorrow cars were eventually scrapped, but Moon Glow was adopted for use as an office by a scrapping yard in Idaho.  That was where some volunteers from Ogden found it.  They pulled together enough funds to bring it to Utah, and started some preservation work, but it all went south from there.

Moon Glow today.

With no long-term funding in place, each step made matters worse.  Accessories in the car were removed, stored, and lost.  Windows were taken out, stored, and lost.  Buildings that parts of the car were stored in got torn down, and the parts were lost. There was no money to preserve them, no permanent staff anywhere to monitor it.

The viewing dome today. I'm unsure if
the sign is someone's sick joke

It ended up at BDO, first stored in a building. When the building was torn down it was moved to a siding and covered in plastic.  The plastic shredded in the weather, now it sits open to vandals and weather.

Moon Glow's dream

Get the theme here?  Every step of the way it just gets worse and worse. Good intentions are one thing, but a full plan to save it, and the funds to do it, never existed.

When I visited it last week I took more pictures.  As you can see, there's not a lot left. There's a metal shell. The concrete floors are still there, but beyond that it is very efficiently gutted.  Last I heard, renovation would cost $3 million, but really, who knows? 

Moon Glow's reality

What will happen? No clue.  For 15 years Union Station and the museums were managedby the Union Station Foundation, which barely had funds to keep the doors open.  Renovation of collection objects was simply impossible.

Ogden took back management of Union Station, and the collections, a year ago. Does it have these funds?  It has more pressing problems, such as removing asbestos from the Laundry Building next to the station, or upgrading the station's 95 year-old plumbing, or renovating the 95-year-old Union Station itself.

Rusted hulks of bygone rail cars are way down on the list.

I'd much rather see the Saltaire cars saved -- it would be a lot cheaper and they have more Utah connections anyway.

Moon Glow is rail history, and maybe there's a rich guy somewhere who can afford to take it on. Absent that, though, it's time to face the inevitable.