Lamar Roberts likes to joke that his gray head of hair was still red when he started planning and raising funds for the Vicksburg Transportation Museum. While the start-stop progress has brought its share of frustrations, Roberts told the Vicksburg Kiwanis Club Tuesday there have been some silver linings in the museum’s five-year push to fruition.

“By dragging it out like this, it has been beneficial because the city has gotten much more involved in it and we were able to get stimulus funds” to renovate the Levee Street Depot, Roberts said.

When the museum is ready to receive its first visitors next fall, Roberts said the transportation artifacts, scale steamship models, aviation displays, scale railroad layouts and library will prove to have been well worth the wait. He anticipates the museum will bring in a minimum of 50,000 visitors a year.

“We feel like we’re going to have a topnotch museum. It’s going to be something Vicksburg will be proud of,” said Roberts, also the owner, curator and operator of the Battlefield Museum on North Frontage Road since 1993. “It’s not going to be a stagnant museum. A museum needs to be a living thing; it has to have a heart. We want to keep it fresh, rotate displays and make it so if you visit it twice in a six month span you’ll see something new.”

Renovations on the 103-year-old, city-owned depot at City Front are to begin by Sept. 1. While the contractor — Kenneth R. Thompson Jr. Builder Inc. of Greenwood — has 10 months to complete the job, Roberts said he’s been told it could be complete in six months. The project is being paid for with $1.9 million in federal stimulus funds requiring no local match.

The Vicksburg Main Street Program and Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau are to share office spaces on the second floor of the three-story depot. The tourism promotion groups will be able to move into the depot about six months before the museum, which will occupy the ground floor. A library and research center affiliated with the museum will also be located on the second floor.

“We’re hoping to expand into the third floor, too,” Roberts said. “We’ll have items and displays that we won’t be able to put in the museum initially because there won’t be enough space for it all.”

Less than a block away from the depot, the dry-docked MV Mississippi IV is to be transformed into a $16 million interpretive center and museum by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It’s also expected to open in the fall of 2011. Roberts said the two new museums, along with the City Front Murals, Splash Fountain and Art Park at Catfish Row, should increase visitor traffic throughout downtown.

“If someone comes to our museum, they cannot go through it in less than a few hours. And then if they go to the Corps museum, they’re going to have to eat downtown because it will take them another couple hours to go through it,” he explained. “We’re hoping it’s going to help everyone downtown, and we think it will be a boost to Vicksburg.”

Admission to the new transportation museum will be around $5.50 for adults and $3.25 for children, Roberts said, similar to current charges at the Battlefield Museum. Discounts for groups and families will also be available.

Though the depot renovations are fully funded, funding for some displays is still to be sought, Roberts added.

“We’re going to be knocking on some doors asking for money,” he said. “The depot is going to look nice, and we need to have nice looking displays, too.”