While the Crescent City train car looks inviting from the outside, the interior is closed to the public because it has no floor.

DALTON, Ga. — From the outside, the Crescent City train car, which sits next to the old freight depot in downtown Dalton, looks shiny and inviting. But the outside is all anyone can see right now.

“The inside is inaccessible because the Crescent City has no floor,” said Brett Huske, director of tourism for the Dalton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), which oversees the car.

Huske says a temporary floor was placed in the Crescent City during a Train Day celebration a couple of years ago so the public could go inside and that was the only time the public has been allowed in since the car was donated to the city of Dalton in 2011.

Built in 1949, the car was originally a luxury passenger car for Southern Railway VIPs in its day. The car was part of the Southern Crescent passenger service that ran from New York City to New Orleans. After passenger service ended in the early 1970s, the car was brought to Dalton and used for many years as office space. Jonathan Caylor and Mark Hannah donated it to the city in 2011 and later that year it was moved to its current location next to the freight depot at 305 S. Depot St.

At the time, Dalton resident Kathryn Sellers headed up a group called Friends of the Crescent City which had a vision for the train car as a center for education and tourism. The city later asked the CVB to take over management of the Crescent City, but Sellers has continued to spearhead the project.

“We saw it as a freestanding extension of the depot so people could get the experience of what train travel was like in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, and potential rentals,” she said. “And the dream I have is that because it has bedrooms in it it could be a bed and breakfast, and we would contract with an outside contractor to manage that.”

But that vision quickly ran into some problems.

“We thought it would be a question of cleaning it up, painting it and opening it up,” Sellers said. “But when we got in there and started pulling things, we found that because it had been sitting down there for 20 years and open to the elements the walls and the floors had simply disintegrated. The electrical was gone. We didn’t know any of that.”

The city of Dalton has put more than $274,259 in cash and in-kind services into the car, and Mayor Dennis Mock says the City Council won’t put any more into it.

“I know it’s city property, but we just aren’t in the financial shape where we can continue to put money into it,” he said.

In addition to city money, approximately $82,000 in private donations have been used to move and renovate the car, and Sellers says she hopes to raise private donations to finish the work.

She says she believes the most expensive part of the work has been finished and the consultants they have been working with should have an estimate of what it will take to finish the work within a few weeks. Once they have that, she says she will start talking to private donors and foundations about grants to finish the work.

Would she consider something less elaborate than her original vision? Instead of a potential bed and breakfast, just something people could walk through?

“I’m not sure what sort of experience that would be,” she said.