There's nothing like a train

There is nothing like a train.  Today, Sunday, July 12, we were back on the road, but not going too far.  We headed to the Illinois Train Museum in Union, Illinois, about 45 miles away.  This museum is billed as America’s Largest Railway Museum.  We were excited because we both like trains. 

We pulled up into the parking lot.  There were only a few cars there and I wondered if we were too early.  Nope.  There just weren’t many folks up and about yet, and that was just fine with us.  We’d have the place mostly to ourselves.

This museum has so many different collections of trains that it was hard to see everything.  Locomotives and cars, buildings, signals, tools, uniforms, china.  My goodness, this was huge.  Yep, I guess the billing for America’s largest was totally fitting.  It has the largest collection of railway equipment I’ve ever seen with huge warehouses of train cars, streetcars, electric cars, engines, freight cars and way more.  WOW!!!

There were several of these and I can only assume they came out of some old train depot somewhere.

As usual, I seem to go for the bright colors no matter what the item is.  And on a train?  Bright rocks!!

Bumble bee colors aren't bad either.

This thing was massive, and probably one of the best looking engines there.

Everywhere you look, there are trains.  We were surrounded by them, and these were just the ones outside.

This guy was taking the trolley over for the rides, and it stopped dead.  He had to do a little reconnection work.

Photographs inside sucked.  But this Electroliner was too beautiful to pass up, even with a not-so-good photo

The steam engine was blowing its black smoke, but it was a beautiful thing to see anyway.

What’s also cool about this museum is that many of the trains have appeared in movies.  AND, the best part of all?????  There are a variety of trains that you can ride on during the day.  Today’s rides included an electric trolley with wicker seats that we rode.  Another we did not ride was pulled with a steam engine.  That one we elected to photograph instead. 

We rode the trolley and the wicker seats were very comfortable.  Better than most airline seats, in fact.

The wheels on some of these machines were just massive.

This is the engine that started it all.  Jaz had seen a photo of this engine on a train site, and was looking around and saw it was at this museum.  Voila!!!  And here we were.

There's a collection of china, menus, flatware.  Forty percent of this collection has been collected by this gentleman.

That's one fancy refreshment menu.

This is part of their Southwest collection.  It's incredible what they had. Even children had china dishware for their use.

This museum is well worth the visit and the price of admission … Senior admission, of course.  It would have been worth it at full price. 

This rusty old train was quite a beauty.

The steam engine was pulling back in so we could get our photo.

If you like trains, this is a must-see museum.  We spent several hours here and still did not see everything.  It would take a few more trips back to do that.