Philip Trandel’s eyes grew wide with excitement when the Polar Express chugged into the Blackhawk Station in the Duerr Forest Preserve recently in South Elgin.
The Aurora 4-year-old eagerly boarded the two-car train with his parents, Scott and Kim, and settled happily in a seat with a cookie and a cup of hot chocolate.
“Santa’s coming on the train,” Philip said. “He’s great.”
Santa did appear on the Polar Express, which carried nearly 100 people through the forest preserve on two 50-year-old Chicago Transit Authority cars owned by the Fox River Trolley Museum. But riders first sang carols, heard a reading from the book “The Polar Express,” and watched the snowflakes fly by their windows as the train rocked through the cold winter’s night.
“We try to play it out like the story,” said conductor Bob Blaus, who organized the second-annual event. “We read the story up until the point where the train reaches the North Pole. Then we sing carols until we reach the Castlemuir Station, where Santa and Mrs. Claus board the train and hand out sleigh bells like the one Santa gives the boy in the story. Then the Clauses leave, and we read the rest of the story while we head back to Blackhawk Station.”
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While other organizations offer Polar Express rides in the western suburbs, they usually charter cars on regular Metra trains that travel through a modern suburban landscape, sometimes with regularly scheduled stops that don’t appear in the children’s book, Blaus said.
“We have the ambience for it here, because we’re going through a forest preserve. It’s easy to imagine wolves howling outside in the trees,” he added.
“It’s a truly incredible experience. The message of the story is so neat. I enjoy watching the children as I read it and seeing the magic of it in their faces,” said St. Charles resident Ed Klemm, a Wheaton North High School speech teacher who read “The Polar Express” aloud.