A Day Out with Thomas

Monday, 21 Nov 2005 | Family

My dad invited us to go see the real life sized Thomas the Tank Engine on Saturday. He was appearing at the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris. I had heard of the museum, but this was the first time I had been there.

Erin used to watch Thomas videos all the time when she was a little girl, but didn't remember anything about the plot anymore. My dad has been intrigued by trains since he was a little boy growing up in Riverside. He used to bug his dad until he got to go outside to see trains when they came by his house.

There were many children there to see Thomas and Sir Topham Hatt. We all had a good time and I had fun taking pictures. We rode on an old passenger car pulled by Thomas the Tank Engine. Tickets for the ride were sold out except for standby tickets. My dad had preordered our tickets and our ride time was 4:30 pm just before the museum closed at 5:00 pm.

Comments

Shari said at 12:45 AM on Friday, December 2, 2005

LOL! We just went to the Orange Empire Museum in October (and we've only lived in Murrieta for two months)! It was fun and interesting. Did you go into any of the big barns with all of the old railway cars? Amazing. We took a train ride out to a pumpkin patch and the conductor told us that they're restoring a steam engine that will run on a track around the property, and in one of the barns, there's a stained glass Victorian car. I want to go back and take pictures one of these days.

By the way, the conductor also told us about the Thomas event and said how insane it was because of the amount of people that show up in one weekend. I think he said 30,000 or something like that.

By the way, just an interesting little tidbit . . . he also told us that although it appears that the Thomas train is pulling the other train, the passenger car is actually pushing Thomas. They want the childrent to believe that Thomas is doing the pulling, but I guess there's no harm in letting the secret out to us adults! LOL! We probably rode the same passenger car when we were there . . . did it have old print ads up near the sides of the ceiling? And an old pull-line with the fares for each stop at the end of it? Pretty cool. I put a couple pictures up on Flickr from the museum.

Small world, eh?

Mquest said at 8:16 AM on Sunday, December 18, 2005

I was at the Thomas event in Paris. What a fun day. I ended up taking about 900 pictures. I really like the bottem 2 pictures on this page.

disneymike said at 11:09 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006

Shari - I noticed that about Thomas not actually pulling the train. Hehe

Mquest - Thanks! I took a lot of pictures, but not that many. Of course, I didn't have a small child with me to photograph as many others obviously did.

Post a comment