Museo del Ferrocarril--Railway Museum

Last Saturday--the 16th of March--we headed out to the Museo del Ferrocarril.

It was housed in an old Madrid railway station--big and tall!

They had several trains set up in there that we could look in.  I didn't see a date from when this train was in operation, but it was still cool to see how the rooms and such used to be on trains.

I imagine people's thoughts when they rode a train as being a mix of excitement and intimidation.  It used to take so long to travel somewhere far, and with a train it was much faster and so many more people could travel.  We are so used to mass transit, but I bet it was pretty cool to be around when trains first came to be!

They did have a couple trains that we could go in.  One was a more modern one and it had an open area where there were table set up for kids to color pictures of trains.  We couldn't find an non-colored on one, and Glenn didn't seem too interested, so we didn't color one.  But we did take a picture!

And the other one we could actually go up on was an old steam engine.  

Here are a couple more of the boys at the museum.

They had little train whistles for a euro and we got one for Glenn.  He loved whistling and hearing the echo.

They also had a few side rooms where they had old train parts, and maps, etc.  One had model trains!  We all liked watching all the little trains and different parts of the model go around and around.  Pretty fascinating!

After the museum, we walked down to see the Antigua Estación de Atocha,

also known as the Old Atocha Train Station.  It is still in use today, but they have also converted part of the inside into a tropical garden.  We walked around a bit--Glenn fell asleep--and then we took the metro home from there.