Take this box and shelve it!

The Railway Education Center in January.

The Railway Education Center is located on the Northwest Railway Museum campus on Stone Quarry Road in Snoqualmie, Washington.  The building is designed to appear like a train station, but was built to provide museum functions including a library, reading room, collection processing, classroom, and restrooms.  

Rolling carriages are the
heart of a SpaceSaver
shelving system.

The library collection is housed in a vault that features special environmental controls to tightly control temperature and humidity.  This room is designed specifically for storing and accessing the paper-based collection, which includes photographs, books, leaflets, engineering records, and more.  This installation opened in early 2017 with just five rolling shelves, but will ultimately incorporate more than one linear mile of shelving.  

Registrar Cristy L. demos
how the rolling shelving
moves along the black
tracks set into the floor.

In just three years, those five shelving units are almost completely filled with books and other materials.  It quickly became apparent that the Museum had to add another shelving unit to allow continued processing of the collection backlog.  

Thanks to a major grant from the King County 4Culture cultural equipment program, and additional support from individual donors, a new 32 inch shelving carriage has been added to the vault.  SpaceSaver made this rolling unit with attached shelving and completed the installation through their representatives at Southwest Solutions.  

Cristy L. shows off the library's new set
of wheels: 10' high, 11' long, 32" wide

The SpaceSaver shelving arrived in large crates and assembled much like a giant Erector or Meccano set.  It was ready to load with boxes after just four or five hours of effort by the Southwest Solutions crew.  Already many important documents including all the chapel car 5 research, and exciting tomes published by the Association of American Railroads have found a new home on this brand new mobile storage structure.

The Northwest Railway Museum staff, trustees and patrons send a huge "Thank You" to King County 4Culture, and the more than dozen individual donors who made this new shelving financially possible.