Colorado Railroad Museum

    We have come to Golden to visit two places: The Colorado Railroad Museum and the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum.  We started with the quilts which are located in an old building in downtown Golden.  Downtown is actually fairly small - dwarfed by the huge Miller-Coors complex on the edge of town.  (The only two days a week that they don't give tours is when we were in town).  The rest of the downtown is nicely restored old buildings with lots of antique shops, cafes and businesses.  Clear Creek (actually more of a river) runs through the edge of downtown and has a beautiful river walk and parks all along it.  It is a pretty area to walk and shop.  The quilt museum is in one of the old buildings.  The information that I found online says that they have over 400 historic quilts and a new exhibit every two months.  The current display is of about 40 quilts by two quilters. The largest quilts used some very traditional applique patterns - all hand done and hand quilted.  Tiny, tiny stitches with some intricate designs.  I must admit, though, that I was looking forward to seeing some really old quilts - perhaps made by the gold miners or pioneers in Colorado.  After getting a taste of some beautiful quilting we walked further downtown to a quilt shop which had a lot of beautiful new quilts, fabric and quilt kits.  I managed to only buy one pattern.

   We left downtown and drove along the railroad tracks to the Colorado Railroad Museum.  A small indoor display gave us a lot of history about the development of railroads in Colorado.  Downstairs there was a large HO gauge train setup by the local model train club.  The large portion of the museum was outdoors where there were dozens of restored historic rail cars and engines.  There was also a large "garden" gauge layout which had working steam engines, bridges, tunnels, waterfalls, and mountains of Colorado.  I really enjoyed watching all the kids walk around this exhibit and talk with the volunteers who were running the trains.  There was some great detail in the buildings and houses that were part of the display.  It was a great museum.