The National Museum of Transportation in St. Louis County gives you a chance to compare some of the largest American locomotives with a passenger coach built in 1833. That early Boston & Providence vehicle comes from the first decades of American railroad service. The museum occupies a site along the former Missouri Pacific corridor at Barrett Station, and its long display tracks let you see the rail vehicles as whole machines before moving closer to study their construction.
One place to spend time is alongside Union Pacific Big Boy No. 4006. Follow the locomotive from the pilot back toward the cab and look for the two groups of driving wheels. The engine is articulated so that a machine of its length can negotiate curves. Then look for Union Pacific No. 6944, a Centennial diesel built by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division in 1971. The museum rates it at 6,600 horsepower and identifies its two engines. The two Union Pacific exhibits make a particularly direct comparison of different approaches to high power.
The smaller steam equipment is worth finding after the two giants. The Boston & Providence locomotive Daniel Nason gives you another point of reference for how the placement and size of components changed over time. Pair it with the early passenger coach. The locomotive and car show the two distinct jobs that every passenger train had to combine, moving the load and giving travelers somewhere to sit.
The preservation effort began in 1944 and broadened into a museum of transportation that also includes road vehicles and aircraft. Plan time for the railroad displays if those are your priority, since the collection can take a while to cover on foot. The museum offers QR codes with artifact histories. On a first visit, the road numbers on Nos. 4006 and 6944 make it easy to pick out the two Union Pacific engines, while the 1833 coach gives you a particularly striking starting point for the older material.
Visitor information
Researched November 2026.
Sources
More railroad museums in Missouri
- Belton Grandview and Kansas City Railroad Museum — Belton: Operating railroad museum
- Crocker Frisco Depot Museum — Crocker: Depot and railroad history museum
- Katy Depot Sedalia — Sedalia: Depot and railroad heritage museum
- Patee House Museum — Train & Depot Collection — Saint Joseph: Broad history museum with full-size train and depot
- Poplar Bluff Railroad Museum — Poplar Bluff: Depot and railroad history museum
- All 6 railroad museums and sites in Missouri
Keep exploring
- All heritage sites — museums, stations and landmarks
- Midwest — the trains you can ride in the region