I live near Chicago, so this place is not far from me. I did volunteer work at the Museum a few years ago, but I just heard about this yesterday. Last month, around the Fourth of July, two children broke into the car barn at the Fox River Trolley Museum with a pickaxe and broke the windows of every trolley inside. They have been charged with the crime, so it is not a mystery who did it, which is good. They caused about $110,000 in damage. Please help the Museum out. I met many good people there a few years ago; some that devoted all their free time to Museum since 1965. The Museum is small, and they believe that this may be fatal to their future. After what happened at the Indiana Transportation Museum, we cannot let another join the ranks of the Fallen Flags. This is a link to their GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/fox-river-trolley-museum Unfortunately, I know some people who don't feel the same, but even if they are not as big as the Illinois Railway Museum or scenic as the narrow gauge lines out west, this Museum and their trains deserve saving as much as any other.
Sigh. The news stories read that the Museum will have an open house so that visitors can see the $100,000 worth of damage firsthand and hopefully raise repair funds. It's somewhat reminiscent of the $1 Million loss suffered by the Knox & Kane RR in 2008 when knothead arsonists decided to destroy the locomotive and equipment storage building. The K.& K. never recovered.
I am going to go there next weekend and I will see what can be done. I want to do some kind of fundraiser, but with school starting up soon, I don’t know if I will have time. I would like to see the parents try to fix what their children have done. It would be good reparations to make the kids work to repair the trains. I would sue, but there would be too many strings to pull to get the money from those families. In middle school, we learned about Hammurabi’s Code from Ancient Mesopotamia. It was based on the concept of ‘an eye for an eye’ or ‘we do to you what you have brung onto us’. Juvy or probation for those kids won’t fix what they did to those trains. They need to pay.
Sadly, some States limit liability of the family. So only a tiny fraction of the damage can potentially be directly collected. I would to know just what motivated those kids to do something so stupid. Also, what the parents plan to do, to "correct" the situation.
