I worked at a community museum run out of a historic freight house, next to the train tracks and historic station and engines and other cars. We hosted model train enthusiasts to set up a display every month. Pretty sure the only NT visitors were the confused people trying to buy train tickets.
Some lady brought her teen semi verbal son in all the time. He'd flap and vocalize and jump up and down. He'd run to the door and watch from the railing rocking back and forth so incredibly excited when we told him the train was on its way (you could hear the whistle as it passed the crossing before ours). He was in fucking love.
Some lady from out of town had the nerve to try and ask me to kick the kid and mom out bc he was disrupting her visit. The look on the mom's face like "oh no, not from here, not from here too" made me so fucking mad. I agreed that someone was disrupting other visitors, and asked the karen to leave. She threw a fit. I was like "You're harassing a regular visitor on the basis of disability. Please leave the premises."
Karen left. I started writing an email explaining to my boss ahead of the inevitable complaint. The mom came up and was like "thank you for making this a place my kid can be happy and himself" and I'm like "ma'am this is a train musuem. If we didn't have autistic visitors we wouldn't have visitors."
@rain-shoshana omgggggg. The museum I worked at was in MD, our historic engine is from the B&O line. Bc of that we as a staff once got to take a behind the scenes tour of the B&O Railroad Museum before they opened for the day. Having a wedding on that turntable...🤩🤤🤩
For reference for the rest of Tumblr, this isn't a tabletop lazy susan. This is a 60' wide circle of stunning hardwood and historic metal track, surrounded by tracks it can line up with which all have historic train cars parked on them. It was used to turn railroad cars within the rail house (and still works!)
