Placement of display replicas has depot nearing completion

Members of the All-Aboard committee got to see the latest additions to the Aiken Railroad Depot Tuesday - even though they're still replicas at this stage.

Carol Poplin, senior project manager with The History Workshop - a division of Brockington and Associates' Mount Pleasant office - installed black and white photos to scale of panels and displays to show committee members how they will look when formally installed in the next five weeks or so.

The exhibit also will showcase nine diorama models, depicting life in the towns along the S.C. Canal and Railroad Co.'s main route - Hamburg, Aiken, Blackville, Denmark, Branchville, St. George, Summerville and Charleston.

The depot construction is nearing completion, with a grand opening and parade coming in September in conjunction with Celebrate Aiken, the observance of the City of Aiken's 175th anniversary.

The displays will include video presentations and interactive panels providing discussions and other programs related to the railroad's history as well as that of Aiken, said Don Barnes, the committee's technical adviser. The city was named for William Aiken Sr., the railroad company owner.

"The dioramas represent the nine towns as they were in 1916," he said. "That was the heyday of the railroad between Charleston and Hamburg. The height of railroad construction in the United States was from 1916-18, he said.

Poplin and other company staffers have worked with the museum committee since late in 2008. While she had provided letter-size reproductions and projections of the displays, the content and scope can be hard to envision, she said.

"We printed everything to scale," Poplin said. "This helps the client get an idea of what everything will look like and gives us a change to check the resolution on the images. We can also make sure the actual sizes that we've chosen will fill the spaces appropriately."

Large background panels in the exhibit will represent the route from Hamburg to Charleston, said Poplin - providing a vista view to serve as a background for the exhibit.

The dioramas depict the towns fairly accurately as well as the way the railroad went through them, said committee member Dudley Erb. The second-floor display also will include a model train that will start automatically through a trip switch as visitors make their way upstairs.

The dioramas include many historic details, such as a water tower in Branchville, Erb said.

"Some of the older people remember kids swimming in the water tower, so that's in there, too," Erb said. "I can't wait for individual town members to come and see this. They have contributed so much to the project."

The end result with the museum and displays and the rail cars will be something to see, Erb said.

"The main thing is to depict the history of what created all this," he said. "Many people don't realize that Aiken is a railroad town, where people could hear the locomotives coming through in the 1880s after the Civil War. People travel over the bridges and don't know there's a railroad there, but it's very meaningful to Aiken."

Contact Rob Novit at rnovit@aikenstandard.com.