Balboa Park Railway Museum Plans Unveiled

The Pacific Southwest Railway Museum Assn. Board of Trustees held a champagne reception Wednesday evening amid old train headlights and lanterns to unveil plans for a railway museum the group hopes to establish in a building of the old Navy Hospital in Balboa Park.

The Navy will be moving to its new hospital in Florida Canyon in 1988 and the city will acquire the 34-acre vacated hospital site.

The railroad museum hopes to gain public support for the use of the 9,000-square-foot Thompson Medical Library.

The decision on who gets to use the building, or whether it will be torn down, is up to the San Diego City Council, Daniel J. Marnell, vice president of the museum board, said at the reception held at the downtown Long-Waterman House.

The Navy Hospital Ad Hoc Committee, appointed by the City Council to make recommendations on use of the land, voted last week on plans for the Navy chapel and the library, Marnell said.

On a 7-2 vote, the committee recommended that the chapel be retained and the library razed, Marnell said.

The entire 17-member committee was not present and another vote will be taken March 5, when the museum board hopes the committee will reconsider, Marnell said.

If that happens, the board plans to approach the city Park and Recreation Department, and ultimately the City Council, to seek approval for converting the building into a museum for railroad photographs, artifacts and memorabilia. Marnell said it would be “an interpretive exhibit of the coming of the railroad to San Diego 100 years ago.”

There would also be a vintage steam locomotive on display in front of the museum, Marnell said.

The railroad museum faces competition from the Combined Health Agencies Drive and a veterans group that also want to use the building, Marnell said.

But the board feels that a railroad museum at the site would be “a new and exciting addition to complement other museums in Balboa Park,” board President H. Chalmers Kerr said.

Kerr said the proposed museum would be “the jewel in our crown.”

The Pacific Southwest Railway Museum already has two sites in San Diego County. One is the La Mesa Depot Museum, built in 1894, which is only 40 feet long and 12 feet wide. “Small artifacts, a little locomotive and three freight trains” are kept there, Kerr said.

At its Campo site, the museum operates weekend train excursions on a 15-mile round trip to Clover Flat.