Today, we are keeping things real simple with a ride on the Disneyland Railroad. The railroad was closed for over a year due to the re-working of Rivers of America to accommodate the Star Wars Land construction. When the ride finally re-opened, it was better than ever with the re-worked scenes blending nicely into the mix.
We are going to start our tour at the New Orleans Square Station.
Here is a look at the re-worked area. The track was re-routed a bit and some additional rock work was added. It actually turned out really nice!
Here you get a good look at the back side of Big Thunder Mountain. Just past the Toontown station you will get a nice view of It’s A Small World as well.
The big difference in Disneyland’s Railroad vs Walt Disney World’s is the inclusion of the dark ride scenes in between the Tomorrowland and Main Street stations.
The first of these scenes in the Grand Canyon. The scenes are similar to what you might see at a museum. The animals don’t move or anything but its still neat.
Next, you get the to real highlight: Dinosaurs!
There have been a lot of rumors lately that WDW will be adding scenes similar to this during its current long time closure of it’s railroad due to Tron construction.
While we aren’t so sure this will happen (there have been no real credible sources to back it up), we 100% hope it does.
It does make a lot of sense as they have the time to get it done and they also just happen to have a bunch of spare dinos lying around after the Universe of Energy closure at Epcot.
We’ll end our little tour at the Main Street station. There is not much in between the Main Street and New Orleans stations to see other than the peak into Splash Mountain (just like in WDW) which is neat. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of that as my autofocus whiffed on me there.
Overall, we used the Disneyland Railroad quite a bit during our trip. It’s really nice having a 4th station in Tomorrowland (as opposed to 3 in WDW) so you can really get anywhere you want to go in the park. We rarely had a wait of more than 5 minutes and found it to be a really nice way of getting around later in the trip when our feet were starting to get a bit sore. The new scenes work well and the dark ride elements are wonderful! Highly recommended!
WDW Therapy: A Disney State of Mind 