Starting this week, the White River Valley Museum will pay homage to Auburn’s rich tradition of railroading with “Wrecked! Misadventures on the Northern Pacific Railway”.

Compiled by guest curator and train enthusiast John Phillips III, the exhibit focuses entirely on wrecks and accidents involving the Northern Pacific Railway (NP), the largest player in early Washington railroading.

“They started in Western Washington down in Kalama … in about 1870,” Phillips said of the NP. “Then they built up toward Tacoma, getting there in about 1873. And from there they just took off, they were like an octopus spreading over Western Washington.”

In 1883, former President Ulysses S. Grant pounded in the line’s golden spike in central Montana, connecting Washington and Oregon to points east.

“They linked the wonderful waters of the Puget Sound with the wonderful waters of the Great Lakes, then promptly went bust because they built through a whole lot of nothing,” Phillips said.

The “Wrecked!” exhibit features several photographs from accidents that occurred in Western Washington, including several train wrecks at the Auburn Yard.

“It was something the museum wanted to do,” Phillips said of the exhibit. “Auburn has a really long tradition of railroad history. There is a large yard still, and back in the day there was a roundhouse with stalls for 25 steam locomotives and a payroll of about 600 people. So it was big here from about 1913 to the 1970s, and even into the 1980s.”

“Every year, White River tries to honor the past and do a show about some aspect of railroading,” he continued. “They wanted to do something with a little flavor and nothing comes through with the hardcore feeling of railroading like a wreck.”

Phillips said the exhibit draws on the vast wealth of local railroad photography, including the work of Al Farrow and Jim Fredrickson, as well as longtime Auburn Wreck Foreman Roman L. Polski.

“We’re very lucky, since Auburn was a big railroad town, they had a lot of guys that were camera buffs,” Phillips said.

Among them were the now-deceased Farrow, an engineer who donated a large amount of photos to the White River Valley Museum.

“They’ve got Al’s collection there,” Phillips said. “And then down in Tacoma they’ve got another NP veteran, Jim Fredrickson. He was a train dispatcher, and he started in 1943 as a 16-year-old during the war and took his camera pretty much everywhere. And between those guys we have a huge number of really beautiful photographs.”

Although the exhibit features hundreds of photos detailing NP wrecks, Phillips said a series of photos of a 1955 wreck in Centralia were the most striking.

“In the summer of 1955, there was a Union Pacific train stopped at the depot in Centralia,” he said. “It’s a pretty fast track down there, and the Northern Pacific train slammed into the rear end at probably 50 miles-per-hour and just demolished it. There is some really beautiful photography of it.”

Phillips said the UP crew had left their train for lunch and the NP crew walked away uninjured, resulting a spectacular wreck with no casualties.

“For sheer damage and good photography, that was the wreck that really struck my fancy,” Phillips said.

The exhibit began Jan. 12 and will run through April 17. From 1 to 3 p.m. tomorrow Phillips will lead a discussion and slideshow focusing on local wrecks. Normal admission to the museum – $2 for adults, $1 for children – covers the cost of the discussion.

On Feb. 4, the museum will kick off its 2011 lecture series with an railroad open house from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children.

From noon to 4 p.m. Feb. 12 the museum will present Family Day, Riding the Rails, with games and activities as well as special guests.

For more information go to www.wrvmuseum.org.