The Mount Rainier Railroad Dining Company holds just as much personal history for a man who built it.

The train is Bob Thurston's legacy, now carried on by two of his children after Thurston suffered a stroke in June.

"My 8-year-old daughter learned how to walk on the dinner train," said Elisa Johnstad, who helped her father run the business. "We had birthdays on the train. It's just been part of our lives."

On New Year's Eve, the Elbe-based train will resume serving a full-course meal on a dinner car from the 1910s. It will also provide views of undisturbed nature from lounge or observation cars, which were part of the American Freedom Train that helped celebrate the 1976 U.S. bicentennial.

In October, Johnstad came back from Odessa in Lincoln County, where she had run a restaurant for the past three years. She promotes her business the same way her father did.

"We are the only steam engine dinner train that actually cooks and serves dinner on this side of Mississippi," Johnstad, 37, told The News Tribune of Tacoma.

The comeback run on Wednesday will be a four-plus-hour ride, pulled by a diesel engine for this one night.

It features a 40-mile round trip between Elbe, near the Paradise entrance to Mount Rainier National Park, and Morton, a Lewis County timber town on the other side of the Nisqually River.

"New Year's Eve is within five days of a full moon," Johnstad said. "If Mother Nature cooperates, we might be able to see some beautiful scenery."

Her father hopes so.

"People love that trip to Morton because you see what you don't from the highway," he said. "Herds of elk, bears once in a while, lots of deer. It's beautiful scenery."

For now, only one New Year's trip and one on Valentine's Day are planned. A minimum of eight people will serve 96 passengers.

Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad will provide the engine for the train, which also includes refrigeration and kitchen cars.

Johnstad eventually wants to build the runs back to twice a week, which is what her father used to manage, and an additional weekday run.

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