California State Train Museum (weekend post: part 3 of 3)

We made a wise choice and decided to stay another night after the State Finals. We figured that as long as we were there, we ought to take advantage of the situation and go do some things that we hadn't been able to do otherwise - make a vacation of it. Sunday morning we drove from Brentwood to Sacramento and went to the California State Historical Train Museum. We have been wanting to go there for years, but it has always been an all day trip that we never got together.

We had a fantastic time! The Museum is very impressive! There are amazing displays and TONS of information. The girls loved it and there were times that I looked at Kevin and he had such a child-like, sparkle-eyed look on his face! It was as if he were four again! There were locomotives, box cars, passenger cars, mail cars, dining cars and sleeper cars. There were all kinds of displays about the history of the railroad, our favorite being the display about the surveyors. There were photos and artifacts. It is an amazing place.

Amanda brought a notebook and wrote down all sorts of information about the different trains. Amanda's favorite train was the Governor Stanford locomotive. (She did a whole report about Stanford University this year.) Rebecca loved the sleeper car because it actually moved like a real train does. She thought that was really cool! Katrina was at first disappointed because she couldn't get on the trains and the displays, but the farther along we got in the museum, the more you could climb and she was loving it! Her favorite was the smiley face train.

The coolest part for Kevin and I was when we were looking at the humonsterous cab-forward locomotive. They had all been dismantled, but the museum got the last one in the world and reassembled it in the museum. It is amazingly huge, and weighs over a million pounds! They had a staircase that allowed you to go up into the cab and look around. Since we had the stroller I stayed down on the floor while Kevin took the girls up to the cab. I was standing near the front of the train when two ladies walked up and one was going to take a picture of the other in front if the train. I offered to take a photo of both of them. When they came back for the camera, we got talking and one of the ladies told me that her father had driven this locomotive. I said this type of locomotive, or THIS locomotive? THIS locomotive, she said. How cool is that?! She said he had driven it for 16 years inbetween Southern CA and Bakersfield, until the mid-1950s when the trains got switched to diesel. We stood and talked to them for quite a while. Her husband, the other lady's father, also drove the same train. When Kevin came down from the cab with the girls I introduced them and he was just as interested to hear what they were saying as I was. And, no kidding, the first lady had been the financial secretary at McClane High School where Kevin graduated. (Not at the same time though.). We talked about famous train museums and sites and when we mentioned the Tehachapi Loop, they said they had ridden over the Tehachapi Loop many times. We have been lucky enough to see a train go through that loop twice, whereas they had been able to actually ride it! It was really neat to get to talk to them! (We wish we had gotten their names.) Another really cool thing we heard about this huge locomotive was that since it was built in 1944 that means that it was built by women. Very cool!

We were asked by a docent later on if the kids were enjoying the museum. We told him that the girls were enjoying SEEING all the trains and things, but we were enjoying HEARING and LEARNING all the great things that there was to know about this great part of our nation's history. Trains changed this country in a dramatic way, and it is wonderful to see so much of that history preserved!

At the end there was a toy train play area for the kids and you know we had a very hard time getting Katrina to leave that area. We are not ones to bribe our kids on a regular basis, but the occasion called for it and it was the lure of a toy from the gift shop that got her to move along.

We were there for four hours and could have stayed longer. Okay, Kevin and I could have stayed longer, maybe Amanda, but the girls were tired and hungry. They were soooo good for having been in the museum through lunch time! We treated them afterwards with lunch and ice cream. We had a wonderful day and we highly recommend this museum to anyone and everyone!

We also saw the terminus for the Pony Express and then went by the State Capital building, and then we headed for home! We had a great weekend!

See all the cool train museum pics HERE.