Jonah's First Train Ride

Last Sunday evening we enjoyed a fun "date" with our first-born, Jonah. He has really been into trains since he was 2 but we had never rode on a train before. We decided to give him that experience and Daddy had never ridden a train either so it was fun for them to both experience it together. When I saw that the Tennessee Central Railway Museum was going to have a real steam train excursion for a limited time, I jumped on some tickets for us.

Since it involved driving over an hour to Nashville to board the train, we decided to make a fun day of it with just Jonah. He loved the train and loved looking out the window at all the other train pieces around us. We were in a nice air-conditioned car and we even got to go up and see the engineer driving the steam train while we went down the tracks. That part Jonah was not too thrilled about because we had to walk into an open-air cart and it was hot and loud so I think it just frightened him a little bit. He just didn't want to get up too close and clung to his Daddy but he loved sitting in our cart where you could hear the faint whistle of the diesel train that was pushing us (the steam train was mostly for appearances sake). They had fake engineers on each cart that handed out Thomas the Train pictures to all the kids. The ride lasted a little over an hour but it was plenty of time to just relax and enjoy the ride and let Jonah soak it all up.