The Railroad Museum of Long Island in Riverhead again hosted street artists who painted a large mural on one of the museum’s classic LIRR cars in memory of those who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.
This was the fourth year that Patrick Voorhees of Medford organized the mural-painting effort. They painted the museum’s railroad cars for Sept. 11 in 2016, 2017 and 2021. The result this year was a super-sized U.S. flag decorating one full side of a rail car.
Voorhees and his friend, Zach Sieglinger, also of Medford, painted the mural.
It was all last-minute this year, Voorhees said, explaining that he had a very busy summer with the weddings of his two sons and other family activities.
“We couldn’t pass up the 25th anniversary, though,” he said.
To prepare the surface of the rail car for painting, the two artists had to “grind, scrape and sand, then Bondo and prime everything,” Voorhees said Saturday afternoon. “Everything was peeling.”
Voorhees thanked Eastern Scaffolding of East Moriches for lending the team the scaffolding again.
In 2020, Lionel trains created a replica of one of the first cars the artists painted in Riverhead. That was a great honor, Voorhees said. The replica cars are available for sale at the railroad museum’s shop.
Last night, blue lights shone up from the site, reminiscent of the lights that lit up downtown Manhattan sky at Ground Zero on Sept. 11 in the first couple of years after the terror attacks.
A young guy in fatigues saw the lights from the Cross River Drive and followed them to the railroad station last night. He said he’d never seen a Sept. 11 memorial so close up. That reinforced one of the purposes of the mural project, Voorhees said: teaching the younger generation about the attacks and what they meant to those who experienced them.
“We all saw it, the flames, the gruesome scenes of people jumping to their deaths, the towers coming down, and the terror that followed, then the unity, and, later, the falling out and division.”
“People say, ‘we will never forget,’” said Voorhees. “My mottos is “we never forgot.”
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