JUSTIN COOK The Roanoke Times

Meghan Dorsett organizes items in the Christiansburg Depot. Dorsett's parents, Jim and Helen Dorsett, bought the building in 1983 and spent two and a half years restoring it with the help of Meghan Dorsett, who, along with business partner Carol Lindstrom, is opening it as a museum this week.

JUSTIN COOK The Roanoke Times

The inside of the Christiansburg Depot has been used for storage of many vintage items, including an old freight cart (bottom right) near the still-operable freight scale on the floor.

That dream will become reality this week.

The couple bought the building in 1983 and spent two and a half years restoring it with the help of their daughter, Meghan Dorsett.

Over the years, it has served as many things: home to a miniatures workshop and railroad memorabilia, Dorsett Publishing, and the Cambria Toy Shop, which was opened to help finance the upkeep of the 141-year-old depot.

Although both her parents have passed away -- Helen Dorsett in 1990 and Jim Dorsett in 2005 -- Meghan Dorsett, along with business partner Carol Lindstrom, are realizing her parents' dream.

"One of the reasons the building was saved was it was my parents' belief that it was important to save buildings central to people's histories," Dorsett said.

From the 1860s to 1960s, the depot was the hub for freight coming into Montgomery and Floyd counties. It originally served as a passenger station as well, before one was built farther down the track in 1908.

Since the building was restored, tours have been available to those who wandered by and asked, but the museum will be a more formal, organized way of presenting the depot's history, Lindstrom said.

The front two rooms of the building will be the museum and a miniatures workshop, Dorsett said, staffed by volunteers, along with Dorsett and Lindstrom.

Dorsett started seriously thinking about opening a museum three years ago but didn't have time until she became self-employed as a consultant earlier this year.

"I was realizing the amount of stuff we had just sitting here in boxes, and I finally had the time to really go through it," she said.

There are railroad maintenance records from the 1940s, pictures, freight scales, timesheets detailing each employee's hours worked and shipping forms documenting the items that came through the depot.

Some of the memorabilia was left behind by the railroad after it moved out, Dorsett said. Local antique dealers keep an eye out for Cambria-related items for the depot, and still more items have been donated by people who grew up around the railroad.

One of those employees was Ralph Markle, who worked for what was then the Norfolk and Western Railroad in Cambria in the 1950s and 1960s before being transferred to Salem.

Markle's daughter, Pat Altizer, now works at Star Promotions, across the railroad tracks from the depot. She remembers taking trips on the railroad with her family and being inside the depot.

"It was a big part of the area," Altizer remembers.

In the 1930s, farmers would drive turkeys down the street and load them up onto trains through the depot, said Mac Mitchell, owner of the depot from the 1960s until he sold it to the Dorsetts in the 1980s.

"Everything that was done in town, everything to get things to market was all done through that freight station," Mitchell said.

Mitchell said he can appreciate the work the Dorsetts did over the years to keep the building alive.

"When they put it back as it was to go with the historical registry, it was a good thing," Mitchell said.

After the station closed as a freight stop, and fewer and fewer steam locomotives came through, people would line up outside the depot to take pictures of trains coming through, Altizer said.

"A lot of train buffs and community collectors still come to see it," Altizer said. "I hope it brings more people here."

Robert Filippi, owner of Better Signs, started his business from inside the depot in 1974 and rented the space until 1984, when he moved to his current location farther down Cambria Street.

He rented only the front, and remembers it being cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and using electrical tape to keep pipes in the bathroom from freezing.

"It was a nice location, and it always got a lot of attention," Filippi said. "Even then, people would come by and want to talk about the history."

Filippi has also renovated older houses in Cambria, and said he knows what it takes to keep up a historic building.

"I'm just glad it wasn't torn down," Filippi said. "I believe it was a great personal expense for the Dorsetts, and I think a plaque should be put up there in their names."

Dorsett and Lindstrom had hoped to open the museum by Memorial Day, but flooding in May caused some problems, including 2 inches of water that seeped up through the floorboards, they said.

The American chestnut floorboards needed to dry completely, and many of the toys in the toy store in the building had to be thrown out because of possible contamination from the floodwater, Lindstrom said.

"A lot of people go for drives in the fall, and we give a lot of tours then anyway, so it's not a big deal," Dorsett said.