Tinder Rides at the Disneyland Resort

Tinder Rides at the Disneyland Resort!

What is a Tinder Ride, you ask? Tinder Ride is a ride on the “Tinder Car” of the train. The Tinder Car is the car directly behind the engine that carries water and fuel.

When Walt Disney designed his original two engines (both built by WED Engineering aka Disney Imagineering) Walt had seats put on the Tinder Cars so he could have his friends and VIP guests ride up there while he drove the trains. Walt loved to show off his trains!

There are still plenty of train enthusiasts that love sitting behind the engineers and watching them drive the powerful locomotive around Disneyland. Disneyland has continued to share Walt’s love of trains with guests by allowing them to ride on the Tinder Cars when it is safe to do so. There are no Tinder Rides when they are refueling, doing a blowdown or during a shift change.

Up until last year only the original trains built by WED had seats on the Tinder Car. You could only ride the Tinder on the #1 C. K. Holiday and the #2 E. P. Ripley locomotives. In 2013 Disneyland altered the Tinder Car on the #4 Earnest S. Marsh locomotive to add one more locomotive for giving Tinder Rides. The #3 Fred Greely and the #5 Ward Kimball still do not have seats on their Tinder Cars and it may not be possible to accommodate seats on them do to the Engine/Tinder car configuration. There is just not enough room between the Engine and Tinder to allow it.

For our anniversary this year we took a Tinder Ride and were excited that the train we got to ride on was the #4 Earnest S. Marsh! We have already ridden on the Tinder Cars of the other 2 trains.

The Tinder on the Earnest S. Marsh is much closer to the engineer than on the Holiday and Ripley. This offers you the chance to have more of a conversation with the engineers as you ride. It is truly an enjoyable experience!

So how do you get a Tinder Ride? Ask! Just go up to the first Conductor you see at the Main Street Train Station and ask if they are doing Tinder Rides that day. The Conductor will check and find out if they are doing them and about how long it will be before you can ride. You may have to sit around the Main Street Station for a couple of hours before you get on. It all depends the needs of the locomotive and engineers. If they need to do a blowdown (let off steam to clear out hard gunky water) you cannot ride for safety reason. If they are refueling you cannot be on the Tinder because of safety concerns. If there is going to be a shift change you can’t ride because they want you to have the continuity of one engineer being your guide. So you may need to wait for the train to go around a couple of times before you get on. Each trip around the park is about 20 minutes. Only two people (or two adults and a small child) can ride the Tinder at a time.

On the Tinder Ride you will hear the history of Disneyland from the view point of the trains circling the park. You will hear why there is a train, how it has changed and how it being there has affected the design of attractions at the edge of the park near the tracks. The engineer will share history and interesting facts about the park and trains. You can also learn about the workings of a steam engine and how it shaped the country. What you hear depends on the questions you ask and the engineer driving the train. It is never exactly the same twice. The Tinder Ride last about 20 minutes or one complete circle of the park. On our last Tinder Ride we asked a lot about the workings of a steam engine and how to drive a locomotive.

Here is our video of our Tinder Ride on the #4 Earnest S. Marsh: