U.P. museum moving to bigger building

It’s moving day for the Union Pacific Railroad museum. Spokesman John Bromley says the museum first opened in 1921 at U-P headquarters in downtown Omaha. He says the Union Station’s a huge building, but Bromley says there was never room in the old building to display all the artifacts, so now they can spread out and “show off all our goodies.” Bromley says the collection includes a mix of historic, social and modern displays. Bromley says there’s everything from Indian arrowheads and pistols to modern items like a locomotive simulator and displays from the dispatching center that show how controllers watch trains moving through the system. That system comprises the nation’s largest railroad, with 47-thousand employees and trains that haul cargo through 23 western and central states. Though the transition will take some time, today’s the big day they move “Eugene” — a stuffed buffalo donated to the railroad museum in 1985. It came from western Nebraska’s Fort Robinson area and is named after a retired director of the Game and Parks Commission, Eugene Mahoney, who helped donate the buffalo — and though Bromley says they tried to call the stuffed animal “Buffy” everyone kept calling it Eugene. The Union Pacific Railroad museum’s moving to the old Carnegie Library building on Pearl Street in downtown Council Bluffs. The space in the museum will let Union Pacific display things that have been stored in boxes for decades.