Summer Garden Railway: Arriving on Track at the Morris Arboretum May 24 |
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May 13, 2014, Volume 60, No. 34 |
The Summer Garden Railway returns May 24 with a fun kids’ craft and free ice cream. This year’s theme is Who Lives Here? It utilizes the houses as a fun way to engage kids by using their own imagination. Clues will be built into the houses, which visitors can use to determine who lives there. The buildings will be fanciful dwellings, such as a really, really tall giraffe’s house offset by a tiny little home for a hummingbird. A coiled house for a snake will feature shingles that resemble scales, and a possum’s home will hang upside down from a tree. This year’s display will delight visitors both young and old.
Visitors of all ages will be wowed by a quarter mile of track featuring seven loops and tunnels with 15 different rail lines and two cable cars, nine bridges (including a trestle bridge you can walk under!), and bustling model trains, all set in the lovely garden of the Morris Arboretum. The display and buildings are all made of natural materials—bark, leaves, twigs, hollow logs, mosses, acorns, dried flowers, seeds and stones—to form a perfectly proportioned miniature landscape complete with miniature rivers. Philadelphia-area landmarks such as a masterpiece replica of Independence Hall are made using pinecone seeds for shingles, acorns as finials and twigs as downspouts.
The Summer Garden Railway is open every day through Labor Day, September 1, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. during the week and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on weekends. After September 1, the Railway will remain open on the weekends from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. through Columbus Day, October 13. On Wednesday evenings in June, July and August, the Arboretum is open until 8 p.m. and the trains will run until 7:30 p.m. Special weekends are planned throughout the summer, including “Thomas the Train Engine Week,” “Circus Week” and other surprise events.
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