A few winters ago, Idaho-based Edward French was helping his elderly neighbor shovel snow off his roof when he stumbled upon a barely recognizable, cat-infested train car buried in a barn.
His interest piqued, the 55-year-old—who also discovered a photo of the train car, which had been built in 1906—began talking to locals about its history. He found car number 306 had been in active use in Washington and Montana until 1955. After its decommissioning, a farmer hauled it 10 miles to his field and used it as a grain and hay store.
For decades, the now-120-year-old relic sat on the farm, eventually becoming an obsolete part of the scenery.
Despite the unbearable smell, Edward—who runs a construction company—saw beyond the rot and ruin, and bought the neglected piece of history for just $2,000 with a plan to restore it.
After navigating the challenge of moving the 61-foot-long car to his 145-acre property in the middle of a brisk Idaho winter, Edward and his eight sons plunged headlong into the project and worked from March through August of 2020. They invested $147,000 and countless man-hours restoring it to its former glory—and then some.
To begin with, Edward and his sons stripped the wood back. After sanding it all down, even resorting to toothpicks and toothbrushes to get all the crevices clean, they found the original structure was actually in good condition.
As the core of the car’s original body began to emerge, the family realized restoration to its former glory was possible.
“It was, I think, just that first zero to one belief that it was actually worth redeeming,” Edward’s son Isaac French told The Epoch Times. “The further we got, the more encouraging it was because we got back to scraping away carefully and finding the original hand-painted lettering—306.”
This discovery of the numbers confirmed it was the car in the original photo that Edward found.
“Then we connected the dots, and we knew exactly what the history of it was,” said Isaac, a hospitality consultant in Texas.
“As in any restoration project, you uncover things that you didn’t think were going to be there,” he said. “In our case, that was areas where it was just too rotted, and so we had to carefully patch in new pieces of wood. But 90 to 95 percent of it, in terms of all the materials, is original.”
As Isaac and his siblings relentlessly worked to restore every piece of the train car, they breathed new life into the space that would eventually be their guesthouse.
One of Isaac’s older brothers also built a timber-framed shed and platform around the car, with a roofline that imitated traditional depot architecture.
In keeping with the original design from the 1900s, the French family used heritage paint colors, a handcrafted light fixture, and furniture from that era.
“[It’s] like transporting back in time to what it would be like to be a passenger on that car,” Isaac said.
Through the restoration process, Isaac and his siblings—who were homeschooled and worked on the farm while growing up—bonded with each other.
“It was such a great activity to be doing when so much of the world was shut down,” he said, adding, “To be able to breathe life back into a piece of history like that was deeply meaningful. ”
Completing the project and welcoming their first guest was gratifying to the French family.
Isaac, who got married in October that year and spent most of his honeymoon in New England, returned to Idaho to spend a couple of nights with his wife in the train car.
That moment, he said, brought him full circle.
“To experience it from that perspective was really rewarding as well, having put so much work into it,” he said.
When The Epoch Times asked Isaac what his favorite spot in the train was, he said it had to be the little lounge area.
“It’s just such a cozy feeling to be there. It’s a great place to sit and read or just enjoy the view,” he said. “Obviously, the positioning of the car on the property with the view is just stunning.”
With the train car sitting atop a hill, Isaac said the views of the farm fields and forests are “spectacular.”
Visitors, Isaac said, have been “incredibly enthusiastic and over the top” about the one-of-a-kind experience.
Inspired by the restored train car’s success, Isaac developed a micro-resort property with seven unique cabins on 5 acres of land and eventually sold it for a record-breaking price.
Having played an important role in transforming the train car, Isaac said: “My passion is creating these one-of-a-kind experiences. So this definitely checks the boxes. There’s nothing else like it.”
