Choo Choo: City of Conway employees build a train for Festival of Lights celebrations
Train lovers and kids of all ages are in for a big treat this Christmas season in Downtown Conway.
The “Shoo-Fly Express” will be rolling through Rivertown streets for the month of December.
City of Conway employees built a realistic train replica for residents to ride after they’re done admiring the lights and decorations of the Festival of Lights.
“There is a little bit of kid in all of us,” said Darrell McDowell, who led the train construction effort. “Everybody gets enjoyment out of riding a train. Even though it’s not a real train, it’s realistic to the point that it’s moving and got the bells and whistles.”
The locomotive has a real train whistle, a smokestack that billows multi-colored vapor and has a caboose for passengers to ride in.
McDowell had a month to get the train built and operational ahead of the December festivities. He was picked for the job because he previously made a smaller train for his church’s vacation bible school.
At its core, the train is actually a 30 horsepower tractor that was stripped down. A generator is also attached to power some of the other bells and whistles. The city then sent the train to a machine shop to start building out the body.
A lot of the train was made using PVC pipe, metal, wagon wheels and fiber boards to make sure it could be used in future Conway celebrations.
“Although we’re painting it, I wanted it to last,” McDowell said. “The rain won’t hurt it.”
Then McDowell took over and finished up the train. A body shop did the paint job and it was all done by the start of Thanksgiving week.
McDowell said he used the locomotive painted on a mural in Kingston Park as his model when making his replica. He placed the number “62” in a bright gold paint to make sure even small details from the mural were included.
“Every time I’d do something to the train, I tried to make it look like the mural,” McDowell said.
The Shoo-Fly Express will be in commission from 6 to 8 p.m every Friday, Saturday and Sunday in December ahead of Christmas Eve. It will be at the end of the annual Festival of Lights, which costs $5 per car.
The ride will start near City Hall and run down toward the Peanut Warehouse, through Laurel Street and then back up toward the courthouse. It’ll also be used in the Conway Christmas Parade on Dec. 14.
McDowell said he hopes everyone finds some Christmas cheer in what he and the City of Conway worked so hard to accomplish.
“Everything I’ve heard, the kids are excited about it,” he said. “The people who built it are excited about it.”
This story was originally published November 27, 2019 at 12:20 PM.
