Lake Superior Railroad Museum — Attraction in Duluth

The museum is wonderful! Tons of information and entertainment climbing and going inside some of the cars and engines. The museum is totally worth it, really. Many displays, kids will love it and adults too. The building also has other galleries that are worth exploring. I was touched by the immigrants section. Lots of information and interesting educational facts.

The ride on the other hand was disappointing. For starters, the ride was canceled due to mechanical problems on our original date, and we had to move our tickets for next day. It messed up our plans/schedule a bit, but what can you do? 😅 Thankfully we still had one more day in Duluth and we were able to do it.

We paid for the first class seats and they double booked one of our seats. The lady in charge was nicer to find a good seat to the passenger and we were grateful to both of them.

On the positive side I am also grateful that we could visit the museum at no charge due to the cancelation and rescheduled date.

When we were able to do the ride we were excited at first. First class on the SkyView train was nice. The wagon is comfortable and cute. The service was excellent, the lady taking care of us was super kind and agreeable. When you pay for first class you get 2 services of drinks and some snacks ( in our case we had a box with small portions of cheese, crackers, a type of ham, and a little red pepper with an olive on a toothpick), later we got a pumpkin spice cookie each.

The train is slow, the ride not always had a nice or interesting view. The best part was seeing the lakewalk and a couple of parks...after that you see the not so nice streets, the backyards of regular houses, and have to wait mostly for the train to change positions from the front to the back of the wagon to drive you back to the station. There is a recording explaining what you are supposedly seeing, but it was not coordinated at all. When the recording said that we were looking at Glensheen we had trees and backyards 😅

The ride is short and not exciting, $40 per person and we were 4, so I felt it was too much. We will be not doing it again, at least...

Having visited other museums of trains, railroads, and transportation, I was not prepared for how extensive the exhibits and displays here are! We arrived at 4:00, an hour before closing, and realized that we easily could have spend several hours here. There are model railroads (well labeled, with "can you find..." games for the kids), real train engines and cars to walk through, an old town with different shops to view, and more.

Two complaints: First, the staff here were, surprisingly, not particularly friendly. They weren't actively rude; they just weren't as pleasant as I expected, especially for a museum that will have lots of children visiting.

Second, the gift shop closes 15 minutes before the musem closes, but there is no indication of this anywhere. We knew we had limited time to see the exhibits, and we deliberately set aside 10 minutes at the end to see the gift shop, but at 4:50 it was closed and the attendant said "Yeah, we usually close the gift shop 15 minutes before the museum closes." WHAT!? From a business perspective that makes no sense. I guarantee we would have spent money in their gift shop, so they undoubtedly lost money by closing it early. At the very least they could have had a sign stating that the shop closes well before the museum does. I just can't wrap my head around that policy.

In any case, the museum itself is well worth a visit, and definitely allow at least...

This was a fantastic museum. I highly enjoyed my time here and it was a really great mix of things from toddler age appropriate train sets all the way up to massive locomotives. It’s a very hands-on place and has plenty of information for those who want to read everything and plenty of things to simply look at if you’re walking around. It is an extremely impressive, extremely well cared for, extremely cool place to visit, and I highly recommend it if you’re considering what things to do in Duluth! Perhaps the best thing of all, however, was the train trip. They had live music allowed you to walk through a bunch of different train cars of different ages, traveled up Lake superior along the North Shore with beautiful overlooks and scenic places and a tour guide over the loudspeaker’s. The conductor, Chuck, was awesome and full of information. The pizza dinner was great, too! Moreover, Jamie, one of the servers, Jamie, really made our trip extra special with his kindness to my son. The entire staff was very kind and pleasant. I cannot recommend this...