When one of the Midland Railway Historical Association's railcars was taken out of service to be repaired, vandals stuck.
"You don’t expect the damage to happen to it and it to be totaled," said Allen Kinsley, the general manager of the association. "It’s just disrespectful all the way around."
The vandals broke almost all the windows in the railcar, stripped copper wire out of many of the engineering components and left graffiti all over the railcars, even the seats.
"To repair a car like this, you can't just go out to the hardware store and by parts for it. A lot of it has to be custom made. The generator alone, to replace that one, is $15,000, plus the window glass at $15,000, plus repainting the car. It adds up and the vandals keep coming," Kinsley said.
"This damage wasn't here a few weeks ago," Kinsley said, pointing to another window that was recently smashed.
So the Historical Association is doing something they have never done before - talking about the damage on Facebook and creating a GoFundMe page to raise money for the fixes.
"We've never been that organization to say, 'Hey, come donate.' Even though we are a nonprofit organization, we don't want to be a burden on somebody else," Kinsley said. "But if we can get reach our goal, then we'll start working on this car."
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Richard Sharp can be reached at richard.sharp@kshb.com.
