pumpkin train

Ever since Liam was a baby, my dad has been talking about taking one of the train rides offered by the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum. However, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with  my dad can tell you, he likes to take his time following through on ideas and projects (she said as delicately as possible). It might be simple procrastination, but then again, he might just be an evil genius, because the result is often that someone else will take the lead and make the plans to get something done. And that's just what happened here because I saw a post on Facebook about the pumpkin trains and decided that THIS would be the year we would make this train thing happen. So I bought tickets, and the five of us went today, along with my mom and dad and Bethany and Joe.

The trains at Hoosier Valley are all retired from service somewhere else. The museum restores them and gets them back in working order if possible, or incorporates them into displays if not. So neat! The car we rode in was a 1950s passenger car from the Long Island Rail Road, and it felt very Mad Men, even down to the pattern on the ceiling. In keeping with the Halloween theme, there were also orange lights and skeletons decorating the cars.

The train ride was a round trip from North Judson to English Lake (which, confusingly, isn't actually a lake but a town named after a body of water that used to exist at the confluence of rivers but disappeared with the advent of modern drainage systems) and passed through the expected fields and forests, and over a trestle bridge spanning the Kankakee River. On the return trip, we stopped at a "pumpkin patch" (really just a bunch of pumpkins laying in a grassy area), and then for the short last leg back to the depot, we sat in the open-air car and enjoyed the brisk October breeze. The whole thing was about 75 minutes, which was maybe 15 minutes too long for the boys' patience level, but I am happy to report that they were not the worst-behaved children BY A MILE. Such a rare and wondrous feeling.