Carolwood Pacific Railroad

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Carolwood Pacific Railroad
Lilly Belle in Disneyland Main Station, 1993. Walt Disney made the wooden structure of the caboose himself.
Lilly Belle in Disneyland Main Station, 1993. Walt Disney made
the wooden structure of the caboose
himself.
Carolwood Pacific Railroad route
Route plan
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

  1. ^ 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

Commons : Carolwood Pacific Railroad  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 34 ° 5 ′ 5.3 "  N , 118 ° 25 ′ 45.8"  W.