Looking like one of a pair of boxcars in the museum's collection, this is actually a bunk car bearing Union Pacific markings, though the railway which gave life to the town of Hillyard was the Great Northern, which set down roots here in 1892. It was the Great Northern shops built at Hillyard around which the gown grew, providing employment to the town until the early 1980s, when the shops were closed.
Bunk cars were the temporary residences of maintenance crews when working out of town, which, naturally, is where most of the track was. They were included in the maintenance of way trains which included other specialty cars, such as track and tie layers, cranes, etc. Though we don't know when the car was built, a stencil on the side indicates it to have been rebuilt in July of 1973.
Once known as the
Hillyard Fire and Rail Museum, it seems now to be referred to simply as the
Hillyard Heritage Museum. Along the old Great Northern tracks on the eastern edge of Hillyard, it is an outdoor museum with indoor displays of railroad and firefighting memorabilia. To date the museum consists of two boxcars, a 1942 Pullman Sleeper Car, a really cool old and tiny diesel switching engine, an ex Great Northern caboose, X 176, and a LaFrance Pumper, circa 1960. The LaFrance doesn't seem to be on display as yet, probably awaiting restoration. There is mention that they also have, stashed away somewhere, a 1959 Pirsch fire engine.
The inside displays are within the caboose and the box cars, consisting of whatever odds and sods the museum has managed to salvage from the extinct railway and the equally extinct Hillyard Fire Department. The museum is operated by the
Hillyard Heritage Museum Society, which was established in 2004, its goal to "
collect and preserve information and artifacts of historic significance". The museum itself was established in 1995 by the Spokane Fire Station Museum.