Volunteer Spotlight June 2024: Jacob Goldberg

We are now introducing a new feature: our volunteer spotlight! Every month, we will pick one of our volunteers and give a quick overview of them to show who makes this museum run and give some human faces to the museum.

Our inaugural featured volunteer will be Jacob Goldberg, our webmaster and one of our train operators.

Jacob works as a software developer in Chicago and joined our museum in the summer of 2022. At our museum he is a regular volunteer, frequently acting as motorman on our equipment and also acting as conductor and giving historical explanations of our equipment to passengers. His explanations are a mix of an overview of the train passengers are riding on and our railroad, particularly interesting stories (such as the abrupt abandonment of the CA&E in 1957 that left passengers stranded in Chicago), and humor (“Please let me know if you have any questions. If I know the answer I’ll give a nice explanation, if I don’t know the answer I’ll try to come up with something that sounds convincing.”) In addition, Jacob works behind the scenes as our webmaster, applying the skills from his day job to help the museum. He oversaw the migration of this website from WildApricot to WordPress in late May and a number of other web modernization initiatives, both ones that have already been done and ones that are still in the works. He also is in charge of maintaining our museum social media accounts.

Jacob has had an interest in trains for much of his life, but it really took off in high school after a trip to Paris which included a lot of travel on the Metro and RER. Since then, he has been interested in trains of all kinds, but especially rapid transit and commuter rail. When traveling he will always make a point to ride the local transit system and observe any unusual features of it. He maintains a collection on Flickr of photos from all the transit systems he has ridden. He has photographed all of the stations on the Chicago L, and is currently about three quarters done photographing all of the stations on Metra.

As part of Jacob’s interest in trains, he came out to visit the museum in July 2022. After the other volunteers noted his interest (and his need for a ride back to the Metra station), they encouraged him to join their ranks. He saw an opportunity not just to look at trains, but to work with them and operate them, and now two years later is out here operating trains regularly.

In addition to just an opportunity to operate trains, Jacob has found a strong community at the museum with the other volunteers. They are a very dedicated group of people all centered around a common interest, and also frequently get together outside of the museum for both railroad-related activities and just general fun things like mini golf.

Jacob is one of a few of our volunteers who lives in Chicago and does not have a car. That does not deter him from getting out to the museum: he will either get a ride from one of our other volunteers or take Metra.