Monday, June 14, 2004
Disney World Train Station Rehab
The Toontown Fair railroad station at the Magic Kingdom is being torn down and rebuilt. This isn't just a normal rehab with new paint and some patches. It is a full construction job. You can find pictures at WDW Magic.
The reason for the complete rehab is that the station was built as a temporary structure (along with the rest of Toontown) and they never planned it to last that long. Now that they are sure the land will always be there they have to build a better station (the current one was falling apart). The interesting part is the station's design will remain the same. There will be no changes at all.
Maybe they figure the current design is perfect. Maybe they don't want to bother designing something new (but if they had to fix the design to be permanent it seems they might as well have bettered the layout). I think in the 15+ years since it was built they could have come up with some improvements that would have been useful.
Anyway... while the station is closed the train will still be running. They are only doing the work on one side of the tracks and the train will just go by the construction. That leaves only the Main Street and Frontierland stations open, which brings me to something I have always wondered.
Why does Walt Disney World only have three trains stations? Walt Disney always wanted the Florida Project's theme park to be bigger than Disneyland and he always loved trains. So why does his bigger park have one less station then Disneyland? Not only that, but the Magic Kingdom opened with only two stations because Toontown/Birthdayland opened later. Why would Walt Disney (who...again...LOVED TRAINS) design his huge park with only two train stations? He didn't die that early into the project.
