The Original Parktrains Website

The History of Parktrains

Amusement park trains have had a long and varied history. I'm in the process of researching a book on this subject. Research has been ongoing for several years now. It's one of those subject where the more you learn, the more you find there is to learn. Much of the historical data, such as production dates and figures, is proving to be very hard to find. For the moment, I'm placing the general information various people have sent me here, on this Website.

The earliest park trains weren't really trains -- they were trolleys. As Frank Sprague's electric streetcar idea began to catch on in major cities all over the world, many traction companies built streetcar tracks out into the country and set up a small amusement park. The idea was to encourage weekend ridership of the trolleys. Often, the tracks of the trolley company would encircle the park, forming a big loop which allowed the trolley to return to town without having to reverse. This gave the trolley riders a sort of preview of the park. It wasn't long before the trolley was stopped at the gate, however, and the job of giving park visitors a preview was usurped by a miniature train running around the park's perimeter. To this day, many amusement parks still feature such a train ride.

Many of the earliest park trains were custom built. Until the 1930s -- and even into the amusement park renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s -- they were almost exclusively powered by live steam. Often, the park engine was a scale model of a famous locomotive. This modeling of famous locomotives has continued even into modern times.

The Cagney Brothers began producing a small live steam park engine through subcontractors in the late 1800s. Headquartered in New York City, Cagney offered as many as four different sizes of live steam park engines. All were based upon the lines of the New York Central's famous #999, which attained a clocked speed of 112.5 mph in 1893. For a time, Cagney also acted as a dealer for H.K.Porter, a manufacturer of industrial locomotives. The firm left the industry in 1928. Cagney was the first manufacturer to produce a standardized park train for the amusement industry.

By the middle of the 20th Century, several companies had begun constructing park trains. Steam was strongly represented by several park train manufacturers, including Crown and Ottaway. But by now, steam was going out of favor with real railroads, and this was reflected in the amusement park industry with the appearance of trains powered by internal combustion engines. Custom built internal combustion powered trains like Dorney Park's Zephyr (shown here) had been around since they became practical in the 1920s. Cagney was first to mass produce an internal combustion powered train -- a steam outline locomotive modeled after the New York Central's streamlined "Commodore Vanderbilt" locomotive, which was the first American streamliner. However, it wasn't until the Miniature Train Company began producing a scaled down model of a popular passenger diesel engine, the EMD F7, that internal combustion powered trains were produced in large numbers.

Steam power, however, was tenacious. People liked the look of the steam locomotive. This fact enabled Crown Metal Products and a few other companies to continue to produce live steam locomotives into the early 1980s -- most of them building on the experience of the Cagney Brothers. Many parks, however, decided they wanted an "old looking" locomotive that had the easy maintenance of a diesel. So, a hybrid model was introduced.

The new design may have looked like a steam locomotive, but hidden inside either the boiler or tender was a four cylinder gasoline engine. In most applications, the leading and trailing wheels -- unpowered on a real steam engine -- were driven through a hydraulic transmission. Since the "drive wheels" were there only for show, various schemes were used to simplify maintenance. The most common were to make the "drivers" idler wheels, powered only by the locomotive's forward motion. Other schemes didn't have the "drive" wheels touching the rails at all. The engine shown here is an Alan Herschell S-16, and uses this latter method.

Other designs have used the steam locomotive drive wheels as the actual drivers. However, rather than being powered through the steam cylinders and rods, the wheels are powered by either electric motors hidden between the frames or (more commonly) hydraulic transmissions. A few have employed purely mechanical transmissions with clutches and gearboxes. Most of these are built on commercial industrial locomotive frames. Power is usually a gasoline or diesel engine -- but alternative fuels such as propane have been used. Chance Rides currently offers propane power as an option on their popular "C.P.Huntington" steam outline train.

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All material on this website is copyright (c) Matt Conrad 1995-2002 unless otherwise noted. The copyrights of individual photographs remain with the photographers; all photos are used here with permission. Permission to quote limited blocks of text is hereby granted provided proper credit is given in a footnote, end note, or (in all web pages) by hyperlink. Permission is not granted to use photographs, but may be obtained by contacting the individual photographer.