This train’s been a long time coming.

Opening Friday in the former depot of the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad on Levee Street, Vicksburg’s long-awaited transportation museum is like the end of one leg of a journey and the beginning of another.

“It’s been a goal for so many years to have a building big enough to show our collection and what’s been done in the various modes of transportation here,” said Lamar Roberts, director. “This is the fulfillment of an idea — a dream.”

For 18 years, Roberts owned and operated the depot museum’s predecessor, the Vicksburg Battlefield Museum, most recently on North Frontage Road not far from the entrance to the Vicksburg National Military Park. He has worked for about six years with city officials to turn his collections into a full-fledged transportation museum housed in the old depot, he said.

Now, the business known as the Battlefield Museum has been dissolved, and the nonprofit Old Depot Museum created in its place.

Friday’s “soft opening” is in advance of the scheduled grand opening July 15. Admission fees will be reduced during the first month since some of the museum’s exhibits and items are still being set up, Roberts said.

The museum will feature models of 250 ships and boats, 175 cars dating to the early 1900s and six airplanes, plus model trains in N, O and HO scales and original oil paintings of Civil War ships and river battles.

Many of the items displayed are on loan from Roberts’ personal collection — models crafted by friend Dave Benway and Louisianan Bill Atteridge and paintings by artist Herb Mott.

The museum represents “both the vision and passion” of her husband, said Sue Roberts.

A native of Yazoo City, Roberts acquired his first model ship — the Confederate ironclad Arkansas — in 1988 after he learned about the Confederate naval yard that had operated there, where the Arkansas and other vessels were built.

“I studied the naval history of the Yazoo River and started getting models of other ships,” he said.

Five years later, he had 33 ship models and 13 original paintings of the action lined up around his living room. “Every time my wife would go to dust I’d about have a heart attack. Finally, she said, ‘get them a home or get me one.’”

“The next day he had rented a little house on Clay Street,” Sue Roberts said — for the models, not for her.

Roberts continued collecting and later moved his museum to Washington Street and, in 2003, to North Frontage Road.

“It’s a hobby that got out of hand,” he said.

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The Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad Depot was built in 1907 and renovated in 1977 and 2010-11. It boasts dark-stained wood floors and stair railings, ceramic floor tiles, 13-inch brick walls and a view of the Levee Street railroad tracks and Yazoo Diversion Canal. Trains occasionally chug past on short trips to or from the Port of Vicksburg about 2 miles north.

The museum comprises the first floor and about half the second, which it shares with the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau. The Vicksburg Main Street Program offices are on the third floor.

On the ground floor, a gift shop opens into a room devoted to river transportation, with replicas like the first U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “dragon” boat that plied the Missouri, the smoke from its engines redirected to come out of its mouth instead of a chimney stack; the Delta Queen paddlewheel steamer, which frequently docked at City Front from the 1940s to 2008; a U.S. Post Office packet boat; and a floating sawmill.

The ground floor also houses a Civil War room, its centerpiece is a Vicksburg battle and siege diorama with 2,300 human figures plus horses, cannon and fortifications placed to depict Union and Confederate positions. Ship models and paintings also illustrate the 1862-63 action on the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers.

Upstairs, glass cases display about 50 vessels named for Mississippians, including the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier, named for the former longtime U.S. Senator; the USS Billingsley destroyer, named for Ensign William Devotie Billingsley of Winona, the first naval aviator killed in a plane crash (noncombat); and the frigate USS Jesse L. Brown, named for Ensign Jesse Leroy Brown of Hattiesburg, the first African-American naval aviator and first naval aviator killed in combat in the Korean War.

Also upstairs, “model cars tell the story of the advances of the automobile,” Roberts said, and a library of books and periodicals on all modes of transportation and Civil War history is available for research by appointment.

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A sidewalk will connect the depot to the neighboring MV Mississippi IV, the centerpiece of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Lower Mississippi River Museum and Riverfront Interpretive Center, which will have a functioning replica of the Mississippi River. The Corps has targeted an opening date of August 2012 for the interpretive museum.

“With the corps’ museum, The Old Depot Museum, the mural wall, the water park and the miniature river model, when we get somebody down in this area they are going to spend four or five hours,” Roberts said. “Then they’ll go up to Washington Street to shop and eat, and two blocks up to the Old Courthouse Museum — we will generate a whole tourist area right here.”

The city purchased the depot and surrounding property in 2001 for about $295,000. Renovations, paid for by grants, pledged city monies and federal stimulus funds, totaled about $2 million until the 2011 Mississippi River Flood deposited 4 feet of water into the building, which became a centerpiece for national news coverage here as the water rose to more than 14 feet over flood stage and nearly a foot higher than the flood of 1927.

Last year’s water damage cost the city an additional $56,000 to repair, and pushed the opening of the museum back about nine months.

The Old Depot Museum is operating as a nonprofit organization, which will allow applications for a number of grants to help keep it afloat. Roberts signed a lease with the city in December that obligated rent payment of $250 a month for 12 months, to be reviewed based on the museum’s financial stability. In addition, the museum has to kick in for utilities.

Previous reports were that the new corporation would pay all museum personnel, including the director, a salary, but Roberts said Tuesday they are all working for free.

“We need financial support,” he said. Supporters are urged to join the Friends of The Old Depot Museum with annual membership costs of $25 to $1,000.

Members get free admission, 10 percent off purchases at the gift shop and, most important, he said, “the tremendous pride of knowing that you helped open and preserve the Old Depot.”