- Welcome to the Great Train Story
at the Museum of Science and Industry.
Hi, my name's John Llewellyn.
I'm the Creative Lead here at
MSI, and I had the pleasure
of working on the Great Train
Story when it was created,
designed and built back in 2002.
So one of the fun things about
this video is it's a 360,
so you can take your mouse or your finger,
put it right on the screen and
look up, down, left, right,
and just look around, and you
can get a three-dimensional
view of the ins and outs
of this cool exhibit.
Fun to go through the tunnel here.
Not many people ever get to see this view.
That's a special thing about this video.
You're going by tunnel
constructions, so we're looking
at all of the different
engineering and industry
that goes into building a
railroad across the country
from Chicago to Seattle.
We're going through Last
Chance Falls right now,
the big waterfall.
It's fun to look up at that
water and imagine it in motion.
One of the funny things
about a model railroad is
the trains are kinda the
only thing that moves.
We have a few interactive
parts, but you have to use your
imagination a little bit because
it's the magic of modeling.
Here's the sawmill town called Sap Creek.
This is patterned after
many different places
in the Pacific Northwest
where lumber and wood products
are an important industry,
making wood for our homes,
furniture, and paper and
pulp and things like that.
We're soon to come into Seattle here.
If you pause it at about
1:34, you'll be able to take
a really good look at
the Seattle Space Needle.
That was built for the 1962 World's Fair.
And that's a cool thing
about MSI is we were built
for the 1893 World's Fair.
So you can tell that the
wonders of the world are always
being presented at World's
Fairs and museums are kind of
part of that tradition.
Seattle is really fun to look around
with your panoramic view here.
You get to see the backside
of all these fishing boats
and the waterfront, the
skyscrapers downtown in Seattle.
The city has changed a little
bit since we first built it.
For those of you who are
familiar with Seattle,
you'll notice the Alaskan
Way Viaduct Highway.
That's no longer there.
They're changing the
waterfront, making it more green
and user-friendly and visible.
The Seattle Train Station,
very historic place.
James J. Hill was the builder
of this railroad originally,
the Great Northern Railway
back in the 19th century.
He was known as the Empire Builder,
and there's a train
called that, run by Amtrak
that goes between Chicago and Seattle.
And his whole deal was
building a railroad empire
by consolidating lots of
smaller railroads together
and making it into one
functioning network.
So that's kind of James
J. Hill's namesake.
We're rounding the corner, you
get to see the transportation
part of the Museum here.
One of the neatest things
about this area for me
is the fact that you get
to look at all the aircraft
and airplanes above, the
727, the Stuka, the Spitfire,
the Curtiss Jenny, the Boeing 40B,
and see the trains and planes
and think about trains,
planes, and automobiles.
Passing along into the mountains
here, we're going kind of
through the Cascades and the Rockies.
A lot of this is patterned
after a research trip
that my exhibit team and I
undertook before the design
of this exhibit happened, and
we researched how everything
looks on this entire trip,
because we wanted to be
as accurate as possible.
We were photographing
all the different shapes
of the mountains, the types of trees.
It's interesting to see, as
you go across the country,
these things change,
sometimes pretty gradually
and sometimes suddenly, like when you go
over the Continental
Divide and the mountains.
The weather often changes.
So here we are in the
mountain town fictionally
called Mineral Springs.
It's kind of patterned after
lots of different towns
you might see in the Rockies, in the U.S.
A lot of gold mining going
on here, mineral industries,
and whitewater rafting
and good stuff like that
keeps the economy going around here.
Make sure you see the
big bridge up ahead here
and look up when you go under
it, 'cause you'll get to see
a smaller train passing over the bridge,
which is a really neat thing
you don't get to see normally
when you're standing next
to the exhibit in real life.
It's fun to get that
engineer's eye view here.
Now this bridge was actually
a composite of two different
actual railway structures in the country,
or in North America, one of
which is in New York State,
the other one is in Canada,
in British Columbia.
So we blended those two designs
together to fit the amount
of space that we have
on the Great Train Story
and make it carry the
trains on both levels.
Here it's kind of fun,
you see the Museum guests
enjoying the exhibit, people of all ages.
It's kind of funny to see
from a stage view here
what the train would see.
We're moving our way through
the foothills of the Rockies.
We're going eastbound towards Chicago now,
and we're gonna make our way
towards the Great Plains.
That yellow locomotive
you see in the background,
the real one, is an actual
replica of Stephenson's Rocket,
which was one of the first
practical steam locomotives
made in England in the early 19th century.
So you can push the button
and see that operate.
Same principle of operation that all other
steam trains followed with.
And then the wheels and
tracks, those are basically
a similar design to how trains are today.
So innovation happens in various steps
as you go through history.
Coming in through the Great
Plains, the prairie town.
You see the hay bales.
Takes a lot of work to
dust all those hay bales.
All the people we have coming
through the museum every year,
they love looking at that
stuff and trying to find
the little details and
there's an arrowhead buried
in the sand along the
way here on the left.
It's still really impossible
to see it, given the resolution
of this camera, but if you
look real close in real life,
you might be able to
catch a glimpse of that
to show the Native American
legacy of all these lands.
Now we're moving on to
the south side of Chicago,
the Calumet region, passing
through the auto industry,
the steel industry.
These are all heavily
dependent on the railroad
to transport raw materials,
as well as finished goods.
So the fun thing about the train is,
it goes all over the place.
It connects the country with the world,
and it carries lots of useful things,
and it carries people too.
If you go on a passenger
trip, you might take Amtrak
or the Metra if you're commuting,
or the Chicago Transit
Authority and the L trains
for getting around the city.
It's a fun way to get
around and take a tour.
As we move into Chicago
here, the freight line
that you're on doesn't really
go through downtown Chicago,
just like in real life.
But you can kind of scroll
over to the right there
a little bit and see the
skyscrapers downtown,
the Sears Tower (the Willis Tower),
the Boeing Headquarters, a
lot of the major skyscrapers
that make Chicago such
an interesting place.
And then we go around a bend here,
past a interlocking tower.
Make sure to look over to the left.
You'll see the neighborhood
of Bungalow Square,
which is the residential
neighborhood of the north side,
south side, and west side of Chicago.
It's a composite of all those areas.
And for those of you who
have been to Chicago,
you might recognize a
couple buildings, houses,
apartment houses, restaurants,
cafes, burger joints,
breweries, things like that.
It's all the diversity of
different people and types
of buildings and activities
that make a city vibrant
and a fun place to be.
You're gonna see an orange
crane on your left side
pretty soon, and that's called
the intermodal terminal.
This is where containerized
freight gets loaded and unloaded
onto and off the trains.
These containers can
travel all around the world
carrying anything from
merchandise to clothing,
you name it, whatever fits inside there.
You can ship things in that
and it can ride on a ship,
a train, or a truck, and get
delivered straight to wherever
it needs to go, all the
way around the world.
That makes it possible for lots
of goods to travel wherever
they need to go and for
people to get what they need.
We're back on the Great Plains here
and heading towards completing the loop.
I've watched this video a couple times.
It's fun to watch it more than
once because you can scroll
around with the 360-degree panning
and see the ins and outs of the train.
So we hope you enjoy this trip
around the Great Train Story.
It's been going strong
since 2002 and we hope
to keep it going for many years to come.
And thanks for visiting the
Museum of Science and Industry.
