Tunnels and Subway Trains

During our Architecture Unit, we deliberately didn't study tunnels---because I planned on covering them separately in another unit. Because there are so many important tunnels built especially for trains, this unit seemed like a natural time to focus on them.

We finally got to watch the last of the "Building Big" series---"Building Big: Tunnels"! We love David Macaulay and we love these movies. The website is good, too.

We also watched this documentary on the Channel Tunnel (the "Chunnel")

This movie we found at the library had information on the Chunnel, as well as other railway infrastructure (bridges, horseshoe curves, etc)

We studied subway trains and enjoyed this interactive map of the New York Subway (and what surrounds it!)

The boys made this underground tunnel using the "cut and cover" method

We also made "tunnel cake," which wasn't really made by any traditional tunneling methods, as the "tunnel" itself wasn't hollow, but peanut-butter-cake-filled. :) But it was delicious! We used our Sebby Cake recipe and made a peanut butter filling (much like this one that makes a peanut butter swirl in brownies---scroll down) for the "tunnel" inside. Yum!

Heber Valley Railroad Field Trip

When I was young I rode the "Heber Creeper" on a school field trip, so I thought I'd check to see if it was still around. They've updated everything (it's "Heber Valley Railroad" now) but it's still around! They even have a steam train that runs in the summer months. It's not cheap, although Monday nights they have a "family night" price that isn't too bad. We didn't want to go at night because the evenings were still dark enough, in March, that we wouldn't have been able to see any of the scenery! But it would be a fun thing to do in the summer.

We got there early so we could look around at the old train cars. The children were all so excited to see things we'd learned about in person!

Like fishplates! Hooray!

And flanges! Hooray!

There's an old caboose and a tender full of coal, but best of all. . . 

An old steam locomotive! They are working on restoring this to working order, I think. They have another one that already runs (but only in summer).

It's so cool to see this up close! We loved being able to see all the gears and rods and pistons.

We looked at the other diesel-electric locomotives too (which we weren't supposed to climb on, apparently, but how should we have known?)

We rode the Deer Creek Express, which was an hour and a half trip---just right. It's a lovely view of Deer Creek Reservoir from the opposite (north) side.

Goldie got passed around a lot. She likes that.

There were some "train robbers" which gave out these "gold coin" chocolates. The children were slightly baffled. Daisy kept saying, "Robbers aren't supposed to give money to US!" They were nice and gentle so the kids weren't scared, just puzzled.

We were lucky to have a beautiful day, so we opened our windows and enjoyed the warm sun!

Diesel engines and Diesel-electric Locomotives

Seb's diesel engine diagram

Maybe if I'd ever been interested in cars, I would have known something about the internal combustion engine. But I haven't been, so this was all news to me. And as usual, once I begin to learn about something I start to see how interesting it is! I think the diesel engine is amazing!

It works much like the gasoline engine, but with much more air compression, so the fuel doesn't need a spark plug to make it ignite---it simply ignites when it comes in contact with the compressed (very hot!) air.

Ky's diagram---Abe's writing

Here's a great explanation of how the diesel engine works

Wonderful animations of diesel engines (you can slow them down and speed them up as desired)

Another animation of a diesel engine

A video explaining the diesel engine

Something a bit different---how locomotives are made

This old cartoon about How Diesel Engines Work is so awesome, I can't even describe it. We loved it! You have to watch it. Here's part I and part II.

Steam Locomotives

Steam locomotives are what we think of when we think of trains! So many people love them, and now we do too! You can learn SO MANY things about steam locomotives and steam engines, so we'll just include a few of our favorite resources.

First, a concise explanation of how they work.

An animation of a steam engine. (You can browse this page for other types of animated engines as well---my boys spent hours looking over the animations!)

We really liked this movie, The Golden Age of Steam Trains. You can just start watching at that link and follow links on the sidebar to each successive part, or find them here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

We made these folded paper steam locomotives.

This looks like a really fun project to build your own steam engine

This link is to the Peter's Railway site where there are some useful pictures and charts showing how steam locomotives work. I have a lot to say about Peter's Railway and I guess this is as good as any place to say it. In short,  WE LOVE IT! We ran into this site and through it, learned about the Peter's Railway books. I was intrigued by the format and ordered some so we could read them. They are wonderful! We love the stories, the pictures, and most especially the technical explanations. They are detailed enough for even my technical-diagram-loving children, yet clear enough to easily understand. They explain things we couldn't find explained in any of the many, many other train books we read. And the author, Chris Vine, is the nicest person you can imagine. We emailed him with some follow-up technical questions and he responded with a long, detailed answer that included links and pictures and friendly encouragement for the boys to get good at "maths" so they could enjoy physics and engineering to the fullest. :) The boys now just adore Mr. Vine and play "Bongo" and "Fiery Fox" (those are the names of Mr. Vine's miniature steam engine and the engine in the PR books) all day long.

There are some other fun videos on the Peter's Railway site, too, but we are especially glad we found the books. We have already read them over and over, and we are saving up to order the other books as well. We hope Mr. Vine writes more books soon!

Paper Train on Tracks

We liked the book Ultimate Trains a lot, and it contained some activity pages where you could copy and fold a paper train to run on tracks. I suppose it's copyrighted or we'd reproduce those pages here. Oh! Look, I found the pages online. Go here for the templates. They're easy and fun to make.

The book had several other activities (you can find them here) including building your own maglev!! which would have been amazing, but looked too hard for us to attempt on our own. We might have tried it if Sam had had more time to help us. Maybe we'll return to it someday!

The "flanges" were cleverly planned so the train could hug its pyramid-shaped tracks

We kept the little girls busy drawing fields of grass, trees, bunnies, and so forth while the boys were assembling the track (which was a bit too hard for the girls to do)---and all the children had fun adding details like railroad crossing arms (not sure why those are blocking the train tracks . . .), duck ponds, tunnels, etc. 

And a little barn and silo. So cute!

Ogden Railroad Museum and Model Train Festival Field Trip

We had a great time riding FrontRunner to Ogden, in spite of it being a cold and rainy day. The Model Railroad Festival is up at Ogden's old Union Station once a year (you can find information about it at that link when it gets close---it's always the first weekend in March, I think, but they have other festivals sometimes too). It's crowded and it costs $5 to get in, but children under 12 get in free.

(Here's a video we watched before we went, about the largest model railroad in the world---it's in New Jersey. So cool!)

We loved the tiny, detailed model railroad layouts. My favorite was this little building being demolished. The only difficult thing is that they're above eye level for small children, so we had to do a lot of lifting little people up to see---while trying to push a stroller through crowds---not easy. But still fun.

With your festival admission you get in to all the museums, too. There was an old caboose to climb in, which we liked. Also a huge model railroad layout, an old handcar to try out, and other cool stuff. It's not a huge museum, but there's an old car museum too, and if you also looked at all the outdoor trains I think it would be a pretty fun outing.

And we saw the Golden Spike!---well, one of the four golden spikes. It's in a safe.

Best of all, we liked seeing all the old locomotives outside the museum (which I think you can see anytime, without paying for the museum? Not sure, though). They were so huge! And powerful! Really fun to look at.

Locomotives all lined up

We also liked this huge snowplow

Marigold enjoying the train ride home

Sleepy bunny

Train Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

I really only planned a unit on trains because there's a model railroad festival in Ogden every year, and one of my Young Women told me a long time ago that she and her family liked to ride FrontRunner (our commuter train) to Ogden, then get off and see the model railroad festival and the train museum at Union Station, and then ride FrontRunner home.

That sounded fun, and I had been wanting to plan a unit around it, but I didn't really think there was that much to learn about trains. Ha! Little did I know. We are now all train "enthusiasts" (as the English would call us) and we're so glad we got to learn more!

Throughout the unit we watched several good vidoes---the boys' favorite was a TV show called "Extreme Trains." There are 8 one-hour episodes, each featuring a different train (freight train, high-speed train, circus train, etc.) and they are really fun. They show a lot of interesting "how-it-works" type of stuff, and though they tend toward the dramatic (lots of footage of the host saying "AWESOME!" or "This is serious business!"), we really liked them. I got the entire first season (I guess there only WAS one season) from the library.

We thought this movie about a train in India was pretty interesting too.

And this video, about our own FrontRunner trains, was very good---we were happy we watched it before riding FrontRunner.

Here's a news video about a real runaway train (Sam and I saw a movie about this awhile ago---it was intense).