The Roanoke Times | File 2007

The Pulaski Railway Station before the fire broke out Nov. 17.

The plan is to put the burned Pulaski Railway Station back the way it was.

"To stay on the National Register, it has to go back like it was," Town Manager John Hawley said.

Hawley said that a Roanoke company, Consolidated Construction Services, is working to stabilize what's left of the building now. There's at least another week and a half of work before that will be done.

By this Sunday or the next, Hawley said, the town will be issuing requests for proposals to rebuild the historic station.

Built in 1886 by Italian stonemasons using stone from nearby Peak Creek, the station was a busy operation for years.

But by the time it was included in the application to establish a Pulaski Historic Commercial District in 1986, it had been empty for nearly four decades. The application called it a "particularly fine example of [a] late nineteenth century depot ... one of the most impressive stations in region."

The year that the station turned 100, the community came together to launch a restoration project. The renovated building was dedicated in 1994.

Until it was destroyed by fire in November, the depot housed the Raymond F. Ratcliffe Memorial Museum. The museum's collection included vintage clothing and uniforms and photographs and documents covering more than a century of the town's history.

Fortunately, the collection didn't yet include Milton "Doc" Brockmeyer's 2,800-square-foot train set and his scale model of Pulaski in the 1930s.

Two months before the fire, the town council voted to fast-track a plan to expand the museum to house the model. But the construction hadn't begun and the model wasn't in the building.

Firefighters carried much of what was in the building to safety, though a lot of it was marked by smoke and water. Other museums in the region have pitched in to help with the storage and preservation of those artifacts.

The fire began before midnight Nov. 17 and burned through the early morning of Nov. 18. Five fire departments battled the blaze, bringing it under control after more than two hours, but not fully extinguishing it until hours after that.

Crews were at the scene until 9 a.m.

This is the second major fire in a historic building that Pulaski has suffered through. The county courthouse, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982, burned in 1989. It took three years to complete the renovations.

Hawley said that he had no estimate of how much time or money it will take to rebuild the train depot. It was insured for $800,000.