>> The following is a presentation of KBTC Profiles.

[ Train Bell Ringing ] >> Mt.

Rainier Scenic Railroad exists because people really love trains.

One steam engine looks exactly like the next.

Who cares?

Why does it matter?

A lot of the work is trying to give voices and tell the stories of people who don't appear in the written record.

We have a collection of locomotives that we preserve, and we're working to tell the stories of, you know, all of the engineering and design that went behind them, but also the stories of the people that operated them.

We can look at the patterns of development and what can we learn about the way we live today, and let's tell the stories of the people along the way.

[ Music ] So I'm Bethan Maher.

I'm the Executive Director of Western Forest Industries Museum, which is the non-profit that operates Mt.

Rainier Scenic Railroad.

I'm from the East Coast, where the railroads are really, really well documented and the work appears in all of the newspapers.

That's not the case out here.

It's largely unwritten and untold stories.

The railroad was first built by the Tacoma Eastern at the time that the Transcontinental Railroad was being constructed.

Tacoma was, you know, the city of destiny, sort of where most business ventures wound up, thanks to the combination of ports and railways.

At the time, in the Pacific Northwest, lumber was the big business.

The railroad started extending its route south, to both logging camps and to service the mills.

Logging railroads, when they were constructed, a lot of the times were built to be temporary.

All of the buildings, the log camp would be moved in via rail and then torn up and moved out.

This was all Nisqually land until about the 1860s when, you know, they were forcibly removed from the area.

But there was still a limited Nisqually business enterprise in the area.

And railroad prospectors initially hired Nisqually guides to survey the area.

And according to the Nisqually elders we've spoken to, the railroad was built through former Nisqually villages but just along their hunting trails.

And that's where the railroad was constructed.

This really was the Wild West in so many ways.

Log camp life was hard.

There was both good and terrible treatment of workers, depending on where you were, which railroad it was, which log camp it was.

So that's the early history of the railroad.

[ Music ] The museum was formed, I think it's fair to say it was largely on accident, in 1980 by Tom Murray Jr., who of Murray Pacific, now Sierra Pacific, a very, very successful businessman who grew up in the logging camps.

And he grew up around these engines.

The few that remained sort of after the scrap drives of World War II were either being used or were in really, really remote areas and rusting away, sort of isolated.

The locomotive next to me here was literally abandoned in the woods.

And a man took it apart, piece by piece, reconstructed it in his house, and built a barn around it.

So some totally wild things like that happened.

In a lot of ways, we are a caricature of Americana, you know, of there's a steam engine and coke in a glass bottle, and it feels like you're stepping back in time.

In our collection, we have eight steam engines, four diesels, and a whole bunch of rail cars of different varieties, passenger cars, tank cars, flat cars, log cars, little bit of this, little bit of that.

>> They're a very unique machine.

It's really by the seat of your pants.

It's kind of one of those things that you really have to pay attention.

You know, you look the other way for five seconds and it can start to get away from you.

So it's just a real fun challenge.

Every day is a learning experience, and they're a lot of fun.

It's kind of something that gets in your blood.

It's very much a team effort to get one of these down the tracks.

>> We run train excursions.

We'll run well over 400 trains this year.

Most of our customers are families.

They're people that want to go out and do something cool and take some cool photos.

About 85% of our passengers drive over 50 miles, and I think it's 80% drive over 100 miles.

So that's significant economic impact for this area that they're, you know, coming to the area, that they're shopping in, you know, the gift shops, they're spending money, they're eating lunch out locally, they're staying locally.

>> We appreciate the beauty of Mt.

Rainier, so we thought what a great opportunity to come and be part of a piece of history.

We also like to support local non-profits, and we just thought it was really neat that there's a group here that's maintaining this experience for people.

>> Because it's so small, the community is involved.

A lot of people realize what good a tourist attraction like this does.

It brings in money to otherwise communities and things like that that don't have industry or anything like that.

I mean, all the communities out here were built on logging.

Now, logging is kind of waning, and so these communities need something else to replace that.

And tourism is a pretty easy thing to do.

>> The towns are all built around this infrastructure.

So when we repurpose it, right, we're still using a railroad, we're just carrying different cargo, so to speak.

We're repurposing it in a way that's still creating economic impact in the context of the infrastructure that it was all built around, right?

So there's a store across the street from the railroad, not on accident.

It's there because the railroad was there.

>> Keeping the history alive by doing it and by being there and having it be operational enough that other people can enjoy it, that's what's going to keep the history and things like that alive.

[ Music ] >> Funding for this edition of KBTC Profiles provided by the KBTC Association.

>> KBTC Profiles are available at KBTC.org.