May 20, 2022
Yesterday (May 19), my friend contacted me and we made plans to meet up. She also made some suggestions of places to see and some restaurants to try.
I wanted to see the train museum in Ellis, KS. I love trains. It runs in the family as my great-grandfather was a train engineer.
Ellis was a small town and the folks there were wonderful and delighted to have guests. We ate breakfast at GiGi’s Cafe. The food was great standard dinner food. The hash browns and bacon was crispy. Just perfectly cooked. I don’t recall what Bruce ate, but he was very happy with it.
The staff all wore t-shirts that said, “Roses are red, Bacon is too, Poems are hard, Eat at Gigi’s”. The staff saw us arrive on the motorcycle and the cook was interested in the bike. He has an old Goldwing. He came out and talked to us for a bit before he had to start getting ready for the lunch crowd.
Ellis has a lot of brick streets. We walked a short ways to the Ellis Railroad Museum.
Bruce paid for the tickets and we walked around looking at all the Union Pacific Railroad items, as well as some other antiques. There was a lot to see, so I picked a few pictures to share.
After touring the inside, we went outside and looked around. They have a beautiful caboose and a working 1/3 scale railroad.
I throughly enjoyed the Ellis Train Museum and would recommend it to anyone traveling through Kansas on I-70 who enjoys trains.
Retirement RV Dream 
I must ask John if we went there.
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I love those small town brief encounters. The museum looks interesting too!
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It was a fun museum. I just wish the scaled down train was running. I wanted to go for a ride.😁
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🙂
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That looks interesting. One of my great grandfathers was a train engineer too!
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It was fun. I wish the scaled down train was running!
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Julia,
When I first started attending Stevens Tech (living at home in Long Branch), I rode the New York and Long Branch Railroad back and forth. Believe it or not, some of the locomotives were steam engines.
Much later in Michigan, I was working with a friend, Bill Marshall who was a model railroad aficianado. He and his wife had a very nice, large home in Bloomfield Hills with a very large basement. He created tracks running all the way around the basement at 2 levels – quite a show! On his business trips overseas, he spent his spare time shopping for engines and cars he didn’t already have. He knew some of the language of railroad people. As I recall, his term for a caboose was a “crummy”, apparently because they weren’t kept clean.
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Brown said, “Tell him it was surprising they had steam engines then. Let him know that I would’ve expected it to be just horses.”
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John said we didn’t see the train museum in Ellis because we drove through at night.
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If you are ever that way again, it is worth stopping for an hour or so. We spent about 4 hours in Ellis seeing what was around. The people were delightful and so helpful. They seemed to be thrilled that we had stopped in to see their town.
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It does sound like a wonderful place to visit.
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We had a great time and felt like we learned a lot.
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We never pass up a visit to a train museum. Love them.
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So do we!
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