CHEYENNE — An iconic piece of Ogden’s history is about to get a fresh coat of paint (and a whole lot more).

The city’s “Merci Car,” one of 49 train boxcars gifted to cities in the United States by France in the wake of World War II, was taken from its home at Ogden’s Union Station in the spring and shipped to Wyoming for restoration.

Mike Pannell is performing the restoration work through his company, the Cheyenne-based Vintage Rail Restorations, and the opportunity to give the Merci Car a new lease on life and help preserve its history is not something he’s taking for granted.

“The Merci cars I find are fascinating because of the fact that it was such an amazing gift from France, and the sad fact that so many people don’t know anything about them,” Pannell told the Standard-Examiner. “So, I’m hoping to kind of ignite that story in Cheyenne and elsewhere with this car; to kind of tell people about the history, because history is important.”

Pannell’s work with vintage railroad cars began decades ago in his native England when he joined other enthusiasts in an effort to save a coach from one of the diesel passenger trains they grew up riding.

“They got scrapped in 1986 and a group of us got together and said we want to try and save at least one example,” he said. “We ended up with 16 coaches and the 250,000 square-foot maintenance depot that was built for them in the ’50s.”

As Pannell puts it, that project “mushroomed into something ridiculous,” and he has continued down the path of restoring vintage railroad cars ever since.

He describes the Merci Car’s condition upon arrival at his facility as better than most of the cars he has seen, saying, “The majority of cars we received are basically chicken coops or rats’ nests or mice-infested, disease-ridden heaps.”

Nevertheless, the car requires significant work — work that could take as long as two years to complete. Pannell says the car will be totally stripped down and rebuilt.

“Once the car is inside, I’ll strip the roof off because it has kind of a tar paper roof on top of it. There are some patches in the roof that have been patched up with incorrect material,” he said. “We’ll cut those back out and mill the correct boards to go on the roof. Then we’ll start pulling the boards off the sides in sections.”

From there, the metal parts will be sand-blasted to get rid of corrosion, and new boards will be installed from the bottom up. A number of broken/missing parts will be repaired and/or fabricated as well.

Unfortunately, the car’s original wood is largely unsalvageable. Pannell says that some of it will be returned to Ogden. Meanwhile, the new wood will be painted in a color that more closely matches what was there when the car first arrived in Utah 75 years ago and also adorned with new shields and banners.

“We do an awful lot of physical research and internet research,” Pannell said of the effort to rebuild the car accurately, adding that he’s in regular communication with the person charged with restoring Hawaii’s Merci Car, as well as an expert on the cars’ history.

While the Merci Car will eventually find its way back to Union Station, Pannell is hoping to see it make at least one stop on its way back to the Beehive State.

“When the Merci Car is finished and before it goes back to Ogden, we’re hoping to take it downtown and put it right next to the one in town here and do a celebration, because it’ll be the first time that two of the Merci Cars have been together since they were delivered in 1949.”