Laporte County: Hesston Steam Museum

Wed, Jun 8, 2011

After our brief visit to Lake County, we headed back to Laporte County on the afternoon of June 4th, 2011 to visit the Hesston Steam Museum.

History comes alive at the Hesston Steam Museum as real steam locomotives take you on a spectacular two and a half mile journey through deep woods, past lakes and farm fields.

I would describe the “museum” as more of a rural farm that an railroad enthusiast family decided to put railroad tracks on their property along with a lot of antique trains and other neat things to look at.

There were three sets of trains you could ride, all three of different sizes.  Isaac and Annie rode the medium sized train – the trip was actually pretty long and elaborate.

I felt really sorry for the people in the back two cars; the caboose looked to be incredibly hot.

The other major display was the still-functioning steam powered generator.

It’ss hard to discern from the above picture, but this is an elaborate steam creation device that uses steam to turn a DC generator (60kW).  This generator was originally used to power the Laporte County courthouse.  It was not in operation during our visit, but I am told it still works and is used for daily demonstrations.

There were other large pieces of machinery, including a steam powered saw mill, an old caboose from the 1800s that you could walk through, and some large cranes that were used on the railroads.

There was also a toy store, which was a hit.

From the steam museum, we ventured a little further into Michigan to see the Toy Train store that was heavily advertised by billboard.

We wrapped up this evening of our trip with gyros for dinner and a swim at the hotel pool.

We headed our the next morning back to Columbus for a 75 minute flight home, including a pretty neat shot of downtown Indianapolis from 5500 feet during our flight.