Golden Melland, the volunteer president of the Minot Railroad Museum, and Grace Baker, the vice president, have been informed the City of Minot is going to be implementing a new flood wall plan around the Roosevelt Park Zoo, which means animal exhibits are going to have to be moved. The children’s petting zoo area will be moved to a different place, as well.

Unfortunately, when construction starts, the tracks in the park will be taken apart and moved, prohibiting the use of the Magic City Express on the weekends in the nicer months. The Magic City Express, according to Baker, brought in an estimated $300-$700 a weekend to help fund the museum. With the train out of commission, Melland and Baker have to find new ways to raise money.

One thing they are planning to do again is an escape room. Rather than partner with a business, the museum will have its own escape room set up in one of the Great Northern Railway cabooses, as it did in 2019.

Clues were cleverly hidden throughout the caboose, challenging the participants to find the hints that would help them remove the lock and earn their escape within the 45-minute window.

In one of the storage spaces, a fake skeleton named Jack still sits inside with his engineer’s cap on all these years later, waiting for someone to discover him again during their quest.

Another way Melland and Baker plan to raise funds for the Railroad Museum is to host birthday parties and meetings in the back room area.

They also are planning on finding at least one day during the week that they can be open in an attempt to get more foot traffic.

Some of the exhibits at the museum will be switched out for other ones or just moved to a different location. Melland said he wants to be able to give museum-goers a different experience every time they go, rather than seeing the same things each time.

The museum has three floors, each having its own unique photos, statues, old railroad artifacts and model trains. The top floor contains an archive room, filled with shelves of donated artifacts that have yet to make it to the museum floor. The middle floor holds the Prairieville scale model donated to the museum and put on display.

Melland mentioned the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Southern steam train will be beginning its journey from Canada through the United States to Mexico. As of Feb. 29, the plan is for the CPKC train to embark on April 30.

The final idea Melland and Baker have for raising money to keep the Railroad Museum alive is to start their own social media channel. Their content would be surrounding trains, who does what job, how the cars hook together and other related material.

At first, they were thinking of having someone do the recording and video editing for them to maintain the page, but they decided to do it themselves.

“It would be his YouTube channel, but we would have the cameras here, [streaming] onto his page,” Melland said. “But that kind of goes where we’re making him money and not [the museum]. You got to kind of figure out what’s worth it and what’s not.”

In addition to having informational and educational videos, the BNSF tracks to the north and CPKC tracks to the south of the museum will be focal spots for cameras to see the trains passing by on video.