The Mudflats are pulling into the station.

The North Fork’s eight-piece Americana string band will perform a free concert Sunday, Oct. 18, at the Railroad Museum of Long Island’s Greenport location, bringing fiddles, guitars, banjo, mandolin, upright bass and drums to one of the more fitting venues the band could find.

The concert begins at 2 p.m. at the museum, 440 Fourth St. And for anyone who knows the Mudflats, there is an especially nice bit of symmetry to this one.

Among the band’s more ambitious arrangements is a 10-song train medley, painstakingly assembled by fiddler Helen Hooke and rehearsed by the band for months.

As the Sun reported in July, Hooke stitched the traditional train songs together without pauses, eventually creating what band members realized had become an inadvertent tribute to three pioneering women in American guitar music: Mother Maybelle Carter, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elizabeth Cotten.

Now the Mudflats get to bring that music to an actual railroad museum.

The concert is the latest stop in what has become a breakout year for a band whose friendships stretch back nearly four decades.

The group coalesced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the musicians began gathering outdoors to play old-time music together. Neighbors started stopping by to listen, sometimes arriving with blankets and picnics. What began as a group of longtime friends making music together gradually evolved into one of the North Fork’s most distinctive live acts. The Mudflats include Hooke and Mimi Fahs on fiddles, Nancy Lee Baxter on rhythm guitar and lead vocals, David Air on banjo, Mary Dorman on mandolin, Deb Roth on guitar, Elizabeth Thompson on upright bass and Colleen McDonough on drums.

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Their musical backgrounds range from Appalachian fiddle music and bluegrass to country, rock, blues and jazz. And there are some serious résumés behind the foot-stomping music.

Baxter spent nearly two decades as a Nashville songwriter for BMG and Universal Music Group and earned a platinum record after country singer Joe Diffie recorded one of her songs. Hooke toured with Billy Joel, Peter Frampton and John Prine as a member of the pioneering all-female band The Deadly Nightshade. McDonough spent 21 years leading the ASCAP Foundation, while banjo player Air came of age during the Greenwich Village folk revival and was in the audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan famously went electric.

Yet the Mudflats are very much a North Fork band.

They’ve made a specialty of taking traditional American music and giving it a local twist. Hooke transformed the old fiddle tune “Old Billy Hell” into a tribute to longtime Orient mechanic Billy Hands, while the band has reworked the traditional “Sail Away Ladies” with nautical references closer to home.

That makes the Railroad Museum a natural setting for them.

The museum itself is powered by another close-knit group of people who have spent years preserving — and continually reinventing — a piece of Long Island’s railroad history.

Museum president Don Fisher oversees a volunteer organization whose members restore railroad equipment, maintain historic trains and operate the museum’s Greenport and Riverhead locations.

At the museum’s Riverhead Lionel Visitor Center, volunteers gather every Tuesday to repair and maintain roughly 70 locomotives, troubleshoot electronics and continually update the sprawling model railroad layout. Fisher has described them not simply as railroad enthusiasts but as “problem solvers.”

Fisher also believes the museum offers something increasingly rare in an era dominated by screens: a place where children and adults can work with their hands, solve mechanical problems and exercise their imaginations.

He has even argued that the familiar educational acronym STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — ought to be expanded to STEAM, with the “A” standing for art.

“In model railroading, you get the science, the technology, the engineering and the mathematics,” Fisher told the North Fork Sun this summer. “But you also get the art.”

That combination of history, craftsmanship, art and community should have plenty of company Sunday afternoon.

The concert coincides with the final day of the Greenport Maritime Festival, which runs throughout the village Oct. 17 and 18.

The Mudflats take the stage at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, for the museum’s “Concert at the Boxcar.” Admission is free.

The show is the fourth of five free concerts being presented at the museum this season, with support from Suffolk County First District Legislator Greg Doroski and the county Department of Economic Development.

The Railroad Museum’s fourth concert of the season is scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 11, when the Sunnyland Jazz Band performs at 2 p.m. at the caboose.