We visited the Huntington Railroad Museum this week. It's all outdoors and it's not very big. But, WoW, we learned a lot and saw some very cool stuff. They had a real steam engine from the 1800s. It would burn one ton of coal every ten minutes! In the movies, you see steam engines filling up with water, but they had to refill their coal just as often!
We also toured a couple of cabooses. Cabooses were phased out b/c they lost their usefulness and also b/c they're very expensive! It costs over $100,00/year to run and maintain a single caboose! Here's Adam and friend sitting in the cupola of a caboose from 1800. Breakmen would sit in the high cupola seats to watch the train wheels.. the axles had to be hand lubricated at every stop so they watched to make sure they weren't smoking. If they did need to stop, the breakmen would have to do it manually by climbing on every train car and turning the break wheel.
I think the part that the kids loved best was riding on the hand car. Hand cars were used by four man crews to travel for track maintainance. A fast crew could get the car going up to 25 mph. We didn't have much track to work with so we weren't quite that fast. LOL
After the museum, we went to the park for a picnic lunch. The kids played on the slides and in the creek. We even found a birds' nest with three little baby birds in the rafters of the picnic shelter. We had to use a mirror and digital camera to see into the nest from below. The weather was beautiful and the kids had fun. What a perfect day!
4 comments:
That looks and sounds like a really cool field trip. And, I learned something just reading about it. I love homeschooling and hanging out (virtually or otherwise) with other homeschooling mommas!
~Kris
What a great field trip! I've always wanted to try out a hand car.
Oh cool! Wish we coulda gone!
Fun! Only a bunch of homeschoolers would use a mirror and a digital camera to peek inside a bird's nest, lol. Looks like a fun trip!
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