Making a train playground
In the middle of 2020 a group of very generous people got together (6 feet apart) and built a train for a preschool they didn’t even have kids in. It was a project of pure love. It took a full month of work on weekends and even a few late nights.
Sunshine School has an otherwise beautiful playground. The only problem is there is a huge clean-out pipe sticking straight up out of the sand. This is because it’s such a lush and beautiful place that the trees have grown roots right into the plumbing. We needed to build something amazing around it, and we figured that a train would be just the ticket.
We collected some ideas of how outdoor wooden playgrounds have been made in the past. We even did some research on trains. Did you know only the front engine car has those little sticks between the wheels?
Once the school was happy with the idea, we got Wayne’s Lumber to give us a huge amount of lumber. A mom carried all the lumber from the front yard to the back yard, with a little help from a very eager four year old.
We needed to figure out the scale…too big and it would be too heavy to move, too small and the kids would not fit in it. Luckily, we had a 4 year old on hand to measure. We made it just his size, so he wouldn't bump his head getting in and out. We made just the front car to start. We could adjust as needed before we committed to all three cars.
With the engine car frame built, we could then have fun and make the other 2 cars and finish off the engine. We made the roofs separate so that we could move them around with a little less weight. We made all the tracks standard so that they would all be roughly the same size. The middle tanker car was really fun. We had to figure out the crazy angles (15 degrees) to cut each surrounding piece while still leaving enough room for the kids to crawl through. The caboose has a nice little table that can seat 4 preschoolers or a really flexible dad. We got to add a steering wheel (do trains have those?), a foot pedal and some buttons.
Once the basic structures were built we routered (¾) all the edges we could get our hands on so that there are no sharp edges. We then sanded everything, to take out all those nasty splinters. All the screw holes needed to be flush so that there was no place to stick little fingers.
We then sprayed the entire thing down with an undercoat. We did this about 3 times, including under the train. We really want this to last 50 years. With it painted, we then caulked every little hole, crack and gap. We then sprayed the base green multiple times. Now it was time to paint the details. We chose a color pallete that would fit nicely into the natural surrounds the school has. With 7 colors to choose from, we painted random boards whatever colors we wanted, leaving most of it green. We of course found a few more things to caulk, and then had to repaint those sections.
