Ridgway Colorado USA - A Model T on train tracks is the newest addition to the Ridgway Railroad Museum.
 
The museum opens this weekend and will unveil the automobile that took 10 years to recreate.
 
According to Jim Pettengill, museum vice president, the Model T is an exact replica of the automobile Rio Grande Southern used for track inspection on the railroad lines.

A former member of the museum named Lowell Ross spent the first six years of the project researching records from the Rio Grande Southern to recreate the automobile as accurately as possible.
 
He used photographs to scale dimensions and dug through company records to track changes made to the automobile.
 
Then, two years ago, Ross's company transferred him out of Colorado and he sold what he had completed to the museum.
 
At that point the Model T was about 70 percent complete and all the museum had to do was finish up the mechanical work and body construction.
 
Pettengill said the re-creation is identical to the original automobile in every way.
 
"It wasn't cobbled together, it was very thoroughly researched. We have all of his dimensional drawings and he had accumulated all the rare parts we needed to do the rest of the construction. We were able to do a very high quality re-creation," he said.
 
In the early 1900s the supervisor of the railroad, W.D. Lee, used the Model T for track inspection along the line to Telluride.
 
Pettengill said the small body of the automobile, about four feet wide by eight feet long, allowed for a closer inspection of the track.
 
Other railroads used similar automobiles, but the Rio Grande Southern's Model T was unique because it was a pre-WWI brass era vehicle that was completely customized for its special use.
 
"In typical Rio Grande Southern fashion they got the vehicle really cheap and then used the parts to fabricate their own vehicle for their own purposes," Pettengill said.
 
Before WWI automobiles had brass radiators and headlamps, but when the war began most brass went to fabrication of artillery and bullet casings.
 
After the war automobile makers never went back to brass.
 
Pettengill said he thinks the automobile will be popular with narrow gauge railroad enthusiasts as well as automobile fans.
 
"It's quite a showy little thing," he said.
 
Along with the Model T, new additions to the museum this year are two Rio Grande Southern passenger cars and a train shed to protect the outdoor pieces in the museum's collection.
 
The museum is opening for the summer season on 30 Apr 2016 and admission is free.
 
May hours are 10:00 to 15:00, expanding to 09:00 to 17:00 for June through October, seven days a week.
 
Tori Sheets.