Carolwood Pacific Railroad
Carolwood Pacific Railroad | |
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Lilly Belle in Disneyland Main Station, 1993. Walt Disney made
the wooden structure of the caboose himself. | |
Route plan
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Gauge : | 184 mm |
The Carolwood Pacific Railroad was a real steam - garden railway with the gauge of 7¼ inches (184 mm), the Walt Disney from 15 May 1950 garden of his villa in Los Angeles in California for operation.
history
Walt Disney moved his family to a house at 355 N. Carolwood Drive in the Holmby Hills of Los Angeles in 1949 . After he had already set up a large Lionel garden railway in the room next to his office in his studio, he decided to also build an 800 m long model railway on a 1: 8 scale in the garden of his house . He was inspired by his cartoon animators Ward Kimball and Ollie Johnston , who already operated Backyard Railroad garden railways on their properties. His lifelong interest in railroads was awakened by memories of his summer stays with his uncle Michael Martin, who was a train driver in Missouri .
The 4-4-0 steam locomotive No. 173 built by Walt Disney was named Lilly Belle in honor of his wife . Disney had a lot of fun doing his laps in the garden with his daughters and their friends on the model railroad cars. This inspired him to open a narrow-gauge railway in 1955 at the family-friendly Disneyland amusement park in Anaheim , California .
His wife Lillian Disney supported her husband's hobby, but forbade him to move the route through their flower beds, so Disney had to cross them with a 27 m long S-shaped tunnel. When the property went up for sale in 2015 for $ 90 million, the rail tunnel was still in place.
When the tracks on the property were dismantled, they were bequeathed to the Los Angeles Live Steamers , who installed them as the Disney Loop on their property in Griffith Park . The Lilly Belle steam locomotive and a caboose were on display in Disneyland's Main Street Station for many years .
Individual evidence
- ^ The Carolwood Pacific Railroad at www.burnsland.com.
literature
- Broggie, Michael, (1997, 2005) Walt Disney's Railroad Story: The Small-Scale Fascination That Led to a Full-Scale Kingdom Donning Company Publishers, Virginia Beach, Virginia, ISBN 1-56342-009-0 .
- Thomas, Bob, (1994) Walt Disney: An American Original , Disney Editions, ISBN 0-7868-6129-0 .
Web links
Coordinates: 34 ° 5 ′ 5.3 " N , 118 ° 25 ′ 45.8" W.