After seven months of reconstruction, the wood coal-mining car at Renton History Museum now actually resembles its old self as a workhorse of Black Diamond’s long-ago mines.

“It pretty much looks like how it was when guys started in the mine,” Elizabeth Stewart said after the coal car’s return last month to the museum, where Stewart is the director.

It took four people to push the car into the museum. The car is seven feet long, three feet wide and three feet high.

Museum staff and volunteers brought the car back from Northwest Railway Museum in Snoqualmie. The car’s reconstruction at the Snoqualmie museum was paid for by a $6,500 grant from 4Culture Heritage Special Projects, funded by the King County lodging tax.

Reconstruction entailed replacing the car’s wood with local Douglas fir boards, replacing the bolts and fasteners and treating the black metal holding the boards in place to prevent rust.

The workers at the Snoqualmie museum also fixed the work done by well-meaning volunteers in the 1970s. The volunteers had attached bars upside down and in the wrong places.

“It didn’t look like how it would have been,” said Sarah Iles, museum collection manager.

Iles is happy with the car’s reconstruction. “It’s actually solid this time,” she said, referring to when it was falling apart.

“The wood and metal of the car had seriously deteriorated. The goal was to stop that from happening,” Stewart said.

The car hauled coal in Black Diamond mines from about 1915 on, Stewart said. The Black Diamond Historical Society donated it to Renton’s museum in the mid-1970s. Volunteers replaced the car’s wood shortly after, and the car was placed in front of the museum.

The car will be stored inside the museum from now on, in front of two coal exhibits. One exhibit is a replica of a mine-shaft entrance, with a sign reading “Renton Cooperative Coal Company org. Feb. 16, 1895.” Shovels, lanterns, faux boxes of explosives and hats affixed with lights are displayed under the mine-shaft sign. The other exhibit shows pictures, maps and a bucket of coal next to a fireplace.

Coal mining dominated Renton’s economy during the city’s early years, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. According to the museum, the coal collected at the Renton and Talbot mines was the first coal shipped from King County. In their first five years of operations, the mines shipped 10,000 tons of coal to San Francisco., fueling the transportation and industrial revolution on the West coast.

Coal cars used in Renton’s mines were likely sealed in the mines when they closed sometime after the 1930s.