Kauai Sugar Train

Grove Farm began in 1854, when German immigrant Hermann A. Widemann started one of Hawaii's first sugarcane plantations on Kauai; he leased it in November 1864 to his manager, George Norton Wilcox, who later bought the operation outright and whose family held it for over a century. The steam locomotives survive because of Wilcox's nieces, Mabel and Elsie Wilcox, who fought for the engines when Grove Farm absorbed the Koloa Plantation in 1947 and again when steam left service in the late 1950s. Around 1970, the locomotives came within a hair of being sold to the Disney Company for $500 apiece — Mabel Wilcox matched the price and kept them on Kauai. When she turned her inherited homestead into the Grove Farm Museum in the 1970s, the four 2 ft 6 in gauge engines passed to the museum, and her 1978 estate endowed their upkeep; they are now on the National Register of Historic Places as the Grove Farm Company Locomotives. In 2004 the engines began running again on a stretch of historic Lihue Plantation Railroad right-of-way along Haleko Road, a track bed the museum only discovered after buying the land as a development buffer.