Off the rails
It's a faded corner of Warsaw that commuters drive past each day without a second glance, but on the intersection of Aleje Jerozolimskie and ulica Towarowa stands a slice of Polish history - the Railway Museum.
With more than 40 locomotives on display and a permanent exhibition resplendent with cardboard dioramas, scale models and railway paraphernalia, it's one of Europe's largest railway museums, and on Dec. 14 it will turn 70 years old.
To mark the occasion, there will be a modest celebration - the unveiling of a revamped display, some extra items brought in from the various "Chambers of Tradition" museums across Poland and hopefully a few people of note will drop by.
"We had to give up a lot of our ideas for the celebrations because of a lack of funds, so it's going to be just a small opening," said the museum's director Janusz Sankowski.
Like Poland's own rail system, the Railway Museum is struggling to make ends meet. Sankowski, too embarrassed to say how much funding the museum gets from the government, did manage to put a positive spin on the dire situation. "It mobilizes you to find another solution and search for some ways of getting money," he said. "That's just the nature of these sorts of museums around the world, that there's never enough money."
Polish State Railways (PKP) provides the museum with the occasional locomotive to add to its collection, plus its location - 1,600 square meters of prime city real estate. With the privatization of PKP chugging ahead, Sankowski said the museum has been guaranteed that it will always have a home of some sort, at its present address.
But it doesn't take much to see how decrepit this place is quickly becoming. From the outside, the museum looks like an abandoned building. Out back, the weeds are at risk of taking over. The locomotives - including the only remaining German armored locomotive from World War II and steam engines dating from the mid-19th century when the railways started in Poland - spend their days in the elements, with only the occasional slap of paint for protection.
"The maintenance costs are huge," said Sankowski, who spent his life working on the railways before taking up the position of director 11 years ago. "To paint a locomotive, just one, with our own people doing it, needs 100 kilograms of paint and they should be painted every two to three years."
Multiply this cost by the 300 other locomotives and 400 narrow-gauge locomotives that are exhibited in six other similar museums spread across Poland, and you get some idea of the sums of money involved.
"But I don't consider this museum as a business," Sankowski said. "It must keep its doors open to educate the public, and I think this will impact positively on the future."
Celia Barnes
