Riverside and Great Northern

 While at the Dells, we also paid a visit to the Riverside and Great Northern, which has preserved and is operating 15" gauge trains at the old Sandley Works there.  So it's railway preservation of a sort, with some interesting differences.

The station building seems a little out of scale, but that's what happens when you have full-sized passengers on quarter-sized equipment.

This guy in the ticket window was sort of a dummy, but the rest of the volunteers were all quite friendly and helpful.

There are Armstrong turntables at each end for turning the locomotive on each trip.

The gift shop is well stocked and there are several displays of toy trains and so on.

Filling the tender, which they seem to do after every trip.

Here's an interesting idea: for $100 you can buy a new tie made of some sort of composite wood, with a name or message of your choice stamped into it.

They want to replace as many wood ties as they can on the entire railroad.  Of course, these ties aren't very big.

Revenue trains are pulled by steam, but some of the switching is handled by a CP Diesel.

On the other hand, when they decided the train needed another coach to handle all the passengers, it was just manually pushed by a shop man out to the station to be attached.

The tiny coupler, with its (loose) pin.  The air brakes have quick-disconnect fittings.  You can get away with a lot at 1:4 scale.

The coaling tower:

The ride is quite scenic.

Finally, we arrive at Western Springs, the end of the line:

Here the locomotive is turned, and runs around the train.

So that was entertaining.  And if you're thirsty, there's a museum for just about anything.

This one's for Frank!