THE Halloween train huffed and puffed its way between Mornington and Moorooduc sidings on Sunday with hundreds of scary children dressed in their most frightening costumes.
Fittingly, they were riding on a steam locomotive that had itself come back from the dead. The K163 – built in 1942 and rescued for the track after 18 years sitting on a plinth at Frankston’s Jubilee Park – has been a feature of the Moorooduc track for the past 18 years.
In the fourth Halloween day festivities on Sunday it carried 380 children on four trips.
Organiser Arthur Stone, of the Mornington Railway Preservation Society, set the scene with a bloodied apron and a cleaver stuck in his hat.
“It was an excellent day,” he said. “We had 230 children on the first loco trip, 70 on the second and 40 each on the other rides.”
And the hat with the meat cleaver in his head? “I had to take it off every now and then when little boys asked if it hurt,” he quipped.
First published in the Western Port News – 1 November 2016
