Rhinelander, WI Train Museum & Hodags

Wednesday, July 9

We continued our free museum adventure into the train museum.

This complete train with steam engine, coal car, passenger car & caboose was just outside the train museum.   

This display showed the various sizes of model trains made even today.

This one man track inspection vehicle was interesting.

While the next 5 pictures look like a picture of a picture it is an actual replica layout of the city of Rhinelander in 1950s.  

Isn't this turn table for trains fascinating?!

Rhinelander is the county seat.

This is the county courthouse.  The gardens in front of the courthouse are below.

The people are obviously proud of their city.  Most of the downtown streets are lined with flower baskets at every light post.  See below.

Here is a close-up.  Many of the street light poles also had the US flag flying.

Downloaded from wikipedia: The Hodag is a folkloric animal where it was said to have been discovered.  In 1893, newspapers reported the discovery of a Hodag in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It had "the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end". The reports were instigated by well-known Wisconsin land surveyor, timber cruiser and prankster Eugene Shepard, who rounded up a group of local people to capture the animal. The group reported that they needed to use dynamite to kill the beast. A photograph of the remains of the charred beast was released to the media. It was "the fiercest, strangest, most frightening monster ever to set razor sharp claws on the earth. It became extinct after its main food source, all white bulldogs, became scarce in the area.  Below are pictures of the 8 Hodags we saw throughout Rhinelander.  I'm sure there were more.

 

 

Then we drove out to see a steam engine driven train that goes to an old logging camp.

Obviously the train was called the Lumberjack Steam train.

Anyone could climb the ladder and look into the engine.

This is the picture Tic took of the boiler.  We chose not to ride the train.

Here is the train starting to back out.  Notice how black the smoke is.
As the train got a little further back the smoke changed to white.  Mostly steam we guess.