Safety Village - Train Project
One of my goals is to rebuild and reopen the original Safety Village, which was a miniature city of Tampa located in Lowry Park in Florida. The site served as a youth traffic school and children's museum from 1965 until 2008, and despite many renovations to keep the 2-acre property up-to-date and usable, it was sadly torn down in late 2010. More information on Safety Village can be found at http://www.tampapix.com/safetyvillage.htm
My favorite aspect of the original village was a miniature steam engine located in the corner of the park alongside a train station. This building and engine were removed in 2000 when the village was renovated as 'Kid City', with the engine's current whereabouts unknown. Seeing as how this little train could be a small, mobile starting point for reconstructing Safety Village as a whole, I took the two family photos I owned, as well as an old recording and whatever other photographic evidence of its existence I could find, and got to work redesigning the locomotive using Adobe Photoshop and Autodesk Maya.
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Once the digital model was finished and matched what I believed the specifications of the original were, I took the designs to several different fabrication shops in and around Central Florida. Eventually, two businesses agreed to help me bring my vision back to life: Custom Stainless Products of Merritt Island, and D-Welding Shop based in Orlando. Over the next year I would purchase aluminum out of pocket and managed the project between the two shops, with each one fabricating portions of the steam locomotive and tender car.
The wheels were custom cut with a water-jet and the engine's boiler was a flat piece of sheet metal rolled into a tube in Merritt Island. Other metal pipes were cut and welded onto the top to simulate the funnel and domes, with a metal sphere being cut apart to provide the curved tops. Larry Kelly of CSP also fabricated the front of the engine from scratch, which included the cylinders and base of the train. Meanwhile the cab and tender were cut from other sheets of aluminum and welded together into the necessary boxes at D-Welding Shop. Once the boiler was assembled and the wheels were cut, everything was brought back to Orlando where David Buritica welded the boiler and cab together and assembled the wheels. He also custom built the engine's plow as the finishing touch. The locomotive was completed in June of 2019, when it was brought to the former site of Safety Village to recreate the photos that were used to design and rebuild it.
The project got the attention of the Tampa Bay Times, city councilman Guido Maniscalco and the Glazer Children's Museum, which is the company that grew from the original Kid City operation that used the Safety Village property in its final few decades. To celebrate their anniversary of serving Tampa Bay's youth and to honor their roots and the enduring legacy of Safety Village/Kid City, the steam locomotive replica was showcased throughout 2021 in the museum's lobby as part of an exhibit documenting the children's museum's history. In addition, two articles in the Tampa Bay Times were published about the project by staff reporter Paul Guzzo.
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Currently the steam engine sits in my front yard, waiting for the rest of Safety Village to be rebuilt so that it can have a proper home at a new miniature train station for tomorrow's children to make their own fond memories with.