Left to right - Wizard, Engineer Bill, and his daughter.
In our hands is a picture of Engineer Bill on his Television show.
To the right, on the easel, is an image of the famous stop light to let us know when to start and stop drinking our milk.
In the foreground is the nearly completed miniature live steam reproduction of Disneyland's C.K. Holiday. What a history in the making, for it is soon to be on display at Disneyland. Long ago, when the first transcontinental railroad was completing the manifest destiny of pushing west to the Pacific, one of the historic locomotives that was photographed at the Golden Spike Ceremony 2:27 p.m. May 10, 1869, Promontory Summit, Utah was Central Pacific 173. Walt Disney lived on Carolwood, in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles, and that was the excuse to name his garden railroad the Carolwood Pacific, keeping the locomotive designation on his miniature reproduction CP 173.
He named his locomotive the "Lilly Belle" in honor of his wife Lillian.
In the 1990's, The Lilly Belle, CP 173 was on loan from the Disney family to Disneyland and displayed for quite a while along with the caboose built with Walt's own hands, just past the turnstiles at the entrance to the Main Street station for many years.
That locomotive was later reproduced and scaled up to 5/8ths scale and gaged at 3 feet to become the Acheson, Topeka, Santa Fe, and Disneyland RailRoad, Locomotive #1, the "C.K. Holiday" on the Retlaw franchise that circles Disneyland to this day.
Retlaw is Walter spelled backwards. The Retlaw company is entirely owned by the Disney family and has always owned the franchise to the Disneyland Railroad, The Futureliner, and the Disneyland Monorail.
Now the steam locomotive is in it's third iteration, going from full scale, down to inch and a half gage, then back up to three foot gage.
The Disney family opened a museum in San Fransisco and requested the Lilly Belle and caboose be returned.
Now Disneyland has an empty display case that seems to need a similar locomotive on display to be complete.
So the fourth locomotive in the series is commissioned to fill that case. This is the locomotive seen in the above photograph.
It is a fully functional live steam locomotive. That means you can fill the boiler with water and fire it up and it will actually haul rolling stock around.
We have a pattern now, BIG, small, BIG, small... What we need now is to re-create one in full size.
Not every thing on Main Street is in 5/8th scale, by the way. This misinformation was perpetuated by Ronald Regan on air, during the opening day broadcast. Many of the Main Street vehicles are built to reduced scale. But the buildings are built in forced perspective. They use smaller windows on higher floors so the buildings appear to be bigger than they actually are. The doorways are of course normal size. Even Sleeping Beauty Castle is built to this forced perspective.
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The Wizard of Indiana Jones
