Laupahoehoe Train Museum

The Laupahoehoe Train Museum is a small community-run museum on the Big Island's Hāmākua coast, housed in the old station agent's house, and it preserves the memory of one of Hawaii's most ambitious railroads. The Hilo Railroad Company received its charter on March 28, 1899, backed by businessman Benjamin Dillingham, initially to haul sugarcane between plantation mills and Hilo's harbor. Its later Hāmākua Division — 33.5 miles of line north from Hilo featuring 3 tunnels and 35 large trestle bridges thrown across the mouths of coastal valleys — was an engineering marvel but among the costliest railroad construction projects per mile in the world at the time, driving the company into receivership; it was reorganized as the Hawaii Consolidated Railway in February 1916. The standard gauge common carrier served much of the island's east coast until April 1, 1946, when the so-called April Fools Day tsunami devastated the line. That same tsunami inundated the school at Laupāhoehoe, drowning 24 people, a tragedy memorialized by a monument at Laupāhoehoe Point near the museum's community.