Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Mine Train and Mule Ride Nature's Wonderland

Two views of Nature's Wonderland. First up is the Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland showing the train passing by the twin sister's falls. A neat feature was that each car was named for a different land in Nature's Wonderland.

Next up is a you are there view on the Pack Mules. The pack is just heading out to the attraction.

3 comments:

Major Pepperidge said...

These are both great; love the triple waterfall on Cascade Peak.

K. Martinez said...

Nice images today. Here are the names of the mine cars from Nature's Wonderland I've seen from photos. Does anyone know if this is complete or if there are missing names from this list?

Mine Car Names:

Living Desert
Olympic Elk
Beaver Valley
Bear Country
Saguaro Forest
Cascade Mountain
Rainbow Caverns

keeline said...

Yes, those are the correct collection of names for the seven yellow ore cars of Nature's Wonderland. Each train set had numbers in the 100, 200, 300, 400 series to correspond with the four locomotive numbers 1-4. While looking at my collection of photos, I have found that the names were not always consistent. I thought that the names genrally followed the scenes on the ride. However, some photos don't reflect this. For example, pretending that they are all in the 100 set:

101 Beaver Valley
102 Cascade Mountain
103 Saguaro Forest
104 Olympic Elk
105 Bear Country
106 Living Desert
107 Rainbow Caverns

However, I have seen car number 3 labeled as Bear Country.

103 Bear Country

Perhaps they had them in a random order at some point and when repainted they had the idea to follow the sequence of the ride. Not all of the photos are dated so a full study of this is difficult.

I don't have enough good photos of the green trains with 6 (not 7) ore cars to know if they were named and whether certain names were reused in the NWRR era.