Boone Scenic Valley Railroad Dinner Train

We arrived at the Boone & Scenic Valley Railroad & Museum yesterday in Boone, Iowa at 5:00 ready to board the dinner train and depart at 5:30. This is the train in the first picture. It's a two hour trip going through the Des Moines River Valley.

In the 2nd picture, we're going over a 156' tall and 729' long bridge over Bass Point Creek. It was built in 1912 and 1913 and replaced a wooden trestle. The pictures just don't show how far down the ground is! You had to just not think about how old it is and how heavy the train is! Click on the underlined link in the 1st sentence to go to their web site and see a better picture of the bridge!

























































































For our meal, we had a choice of Prime Rib, Chicken Marsala, Roast Pork Loin, Salmon Steak or Five-Cheese Lasagna. We both had the pork loin. Everything was very good! But look at that monstrous piece of cheesecake!

Since this trip was for our anniversary, we booked a private cabin for our meal. We didn't really want to sit at a table for 4 with strangers. We're glad we did, but as you can see in the last picture, all of the couples had tables to themselves since it wasn't full on this day.

They also do a Dessert Train and Picnic Train.

This was Bill's first ride on a train! We both really enjoyed it. We stayed in Ames last night and looked around there this morning. Pictures of that next!

Ames and Boone are very near Des Moines which is about two hours away from us. Near enough to go to once in a while but far enough away that Bill promises Des Moines will never spread this far north like cities tend to do.