One day, two members of the restoration crew were hard at work rebuilding Reading switcher No. 1251. The two have pretty serious jobs in real life, one being a member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, the other a computer expert, but at the museum they sometimes wonder if they are in a circus. One task was to get some electrical wiring snaked through a conduit on the locomotive. Each was at the opposite end, leaning out precariously, trying respectively to push and pull the wire through. It was tricky, with each intently at work, hardly moving lest the wire kink.

Along came a man and a woman. She pondered the scene for a moment then proclaimed, "Look, honey, they have dummies here!"

Hearing that, the legislator muttered, "You may be right, lady," and she almost fell over backwards, grabbing her husband by the arm and exclaiming, "Oh my, they're alive." The duo hastily retreated, leaving the volunteers still struggling with the wiring hardly moving but now with big grins.

Another episode happened in the pit under a Pennsy H3 consolidation locomotive, referred to as a "Johnstown Flood" locomotive because it was the class of locomotive in service during that disaster, several being swept off the track by torrential waters. The pit is open to allow visitors to see the locomotive's underside.

Two volunteers were in the pit, one on a ladder adjusting something on the locomotive's undercarriage, the other steadying the ladder. A lady came down the steps, having just read the sign describing the H3's role in the flood. She looked around the pit, then quizzically addressed the guy holding the ladder, "So this is where the Johnstown Flood was!" The volunteer below was paralyzed by the question, but from above the other's disembodied voice came down, "No ma'am, I believe it was at Johnstown."

Thoroughly befuddled, the woman backed up the steps, never to be seen again. It was some job to keep the ladder from collapsing from the paroxysms at both ends.

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And then there are the visitors (mostly men in this case) who stand by our GG1 electric locomotive, telling others about their memories of it running by their house -- on a line that was never electrified.

Or the visitor who not only called our working Reading Railroad turntable a roundhouse, but also told his little boy that real ones had more than one track so the trains could go in different directions.

Another variation was this observation from one visitor: "This is just an exhibit. Real turntables had two sets of parallel tracks to allow for passing."

Perhaps best was the parent patiently explaining to a child how the brake wheel on the back of the caboose allowed the train to be steered!

By golly, sometimes it all seems worth the effort just for the free entertainment. And the volunteers thought they were the interpreters!

"What are they doing, and why are they doing it that way? Did they really paint the wheels in the old days?" Such are the questions of curious visitors as they notice that work is going on around them. "We're preparing the surface of the metal for repainting, and we have to do it this way so the paint sticks. And, yes, they did paint the wheels," answers a volunteer restoration worker.

Its a simple encounter, yet it's also an important one. Work always seems to be going on somewhere around most railway museums, and the restoration volunteers doing the work can serve as a museum's best emissaries. Visitors like to watch work; as the saving goes, they could watch it for hours.

And since they don't always understand what's going on, they need to ask -- or go away without knowing. Wouldn't we rather that they learned something?