TrainTopia In The Frisco Discovery Center — Attraction in Frisco

Worthless, complete and utter let down!! I thought about giving it more than 1 star because of the staff, but the more I thought about it the more disappointed I got. Definitely not worth the time or money.

We drove for an hour with three small children to get to it and when we got there during normal business hours no one was there and a pad lock was on the front gate. Several families were standing outside waiting for someone to open it up, but no one ever came. I tried calling the number, but it just went to answering machine. After we waited for nearly 30 minutes we left at 10:45 AM, 45 minutes after the museum was supposed to be open.

We ended up going to a restaurant down the rode and tried the museum again just after 12:00 noon. They had opened the gate by that point. When I asked the woman inside why they weren’t there at 10 she said they had special hours today due to an Arts Festival at Fair Park. I told her the website did not reflect the hour changes and there was no sign out front and several families had been waiting to get in for almost an hour. She apologized and said it was free today for the arts festival. She told me she would talk to her “web guy” about making sure the site was updated next time.

We had already purchased tickets online through a discount site, but she said to keep it and come back another time with it since today was free for everyone. I thought that was nice, but after walking through it I am just going to throw my voucher away.

They tell you that you can walk through and inside the trains, which really isn’t true. There were only 2 engines and 1 car you could get inside. One of the engines was even blocked off so you couldn’t really get into it just peak inside a gate. They don’t even have signs or anything up to let you know about the cars or their history. You would see the same stuff if you walked down and toured a local train yard and they wouldn’t charge like this.

Bottom line this place is not worth the $7 admission for adults and whatever they charge for kids. You can walk through the whole thing in just a few minutes. Even free this place is a complete...

This will be a great place as they continue to build. Be sure that you know what is available before you make the decision to go. The inside portion of the museum is an amazing model railroad that was built by a local oil and gas barron as a family collection that upon his death the family gave to the museum. If is wonderful that it has found a home because it is amazing and it would be sad if if was lost or sold off in parts. Be sure to ask the staff to tell you all about the parts of the model railroad, because each part represents a different portion of Texas, New Mexico or Arizona. There are do many hidden details in the model that you really need to take a couple of walks through it to catch some of the finer hidden figures. They do have a sheet with a scavenger hunt on it to help you know what you should be looking for.

I was lucky and got there just in time to pay a little extra and go out and see the rolling stock. The museum has a great vision for what it will be in the future but they are still building, but making significant progress. On the tour, we got to walk through 2 Pullman cars, and climb up into the engineer's seat of one of the steam locomotives. The rest of the tour was walking amongst the tracks and looking at the cars from the outside. Our tour guide was very nice and seemed very knowledgable, but spent a lot of time speaking about draining and ongoing construction plans. I would have preferred even more about the trains.

It will be interesting to watch this museum grow. Money will be the key to their growth, so if you want to have a neat experience give them some encouragement by visiting and help them raise their visitation numbers so that they can apply for more grants and continue to build on...

I'm not a train buff, although over the years we've ridden almost every type and accommodation just out of novelty. Today--as a high school class assignment--for the first time we visited the Museum of the American Railroad here in Frisco. Some other activity sponsored by the City made it really hard to drive to the museum, but we eventually got onto the hour-long $8 outdoor tour. For adults and older kids I highly recommend it. The younger kids parents brought on our tour were unhappy within a few minutes. (This is not a "Let's go see Thomas" attraction.) Even not being a fan I would have happily listened for another hour because it was really well-narrated and varied. There are some really cool pieces there, with a significant history. Once the tour moved inside to $4 Traintopia, though, I was ready to come home. Model dioramas are just not my thing--and, surprisingly, the younger kids I saw in Traintopia weren't engaged for more than a couple of minutes, either. YMMV, but this didn't seem like a young child place even though I've always thought of it as such (and thus never went).

Anyway, there's a photo of my high schooler on the famous Meteor locomotive. It pulled Harry Truman on his presidential campaign tour in 1948. Normally it pulled a regularly scheduled passenger train from Dallas to OKC to Saint Louis on the "Frisco" railroad (from which Frisco city was named back in 1904).

Bonus for the docent who correctly...