The Choo Choo Hotel

No tours were taken yesterday. Instead, we spent a leisurely morning at the hotel shopping, looking at the grounds, and swimming. Later in the day, we took in a movie (Despicable Me 2) and attended a couple convention seminars on new Lionel products and on scenery construction.

The Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel is a national historic landmark. Railroads have always been a big part of this area, and the passenger lines that ran through here in the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s were important to the south. Of course, you may know the old song made famous by the Glen Miller band, for which you can easily find YouTube videos if you want.

The hotel consists of the beautiful old train station and several added hotel room buildings that have been added behind the station. However, they have also kept the old passenger platforms that extend out behind the station, and quite a number of passenger cars still sit on the rails along those platforms. Most of these have been converted into hotel rooms by splitting the interior space in two at the center and then adding a bedroom in each space. Henry and I are staying in one of these rooms.

Here is one of the old original Chattanooga passenger line engines.

You can see that we are at the farthest end of one of the platforms. Henry is standing at the entrance to our room in this car.

Some very pretty gardens and fountains have been added to the grounds as well.

Henry liked this actions sequence I did of his morning entrance to the pool. Actually, there are many more pictures in the sequence, and he said it is like looking at one of those flip books that shows a moving picture.

Another of the fun things we did this day was to tour the several electric train exhibits. There are three Lionel layouts. This one is in the lobby of the hotel, and it is drawing lots of attention and oohs and aahs from little persons. The exhibitors are quick to hand out Lionel catalogs to anyone who shows interest. OK--I'm excited by the layouts too!

The hotel also hosts the permanent layout of a regional Tennessee electric train club. This layout is HO gauge and is 157 feet long and about 30 feet wide at its widest point. It is just loaded with fun scenes, little details (like a moving cluster of teeny chickens pecking at food on a farm as the trains roll by). Lookout Mountain is featured, along with its inclined railway. One train has a camera mounted at its front, and a TV displays what it says as it traverses the layout. Very cool! We spent lots of time there.

After we left the end-of-day seminars, we saw the hotel's rooftop sign all lit up for the night. Part of it is animated (smoke and track). All of us club members who attended received a working model of this sign to use in our own layouts or as desktop items.