Old West Steam Train Coloring Page

Old West Steam Train Coloring Page puts a frontier locomotive head on in the middle of the desert, with two flat topped mesas behind it and cactus on both sides. Free printable old west train coloring pages work best from this angle: the funnel, the bell and the cowcatcher all read at once instead of hiding behind a side view. Good for ages 4 to 10, and for anyone who wants a page where the subject and the setting each get half the sheet. Letter size PDF, ready to print at home.

How this coloring page was created

The concept we entered on Colorin AI was: "An old western steam train coming toward the viewer with a big smokestack, a bell and a cow catcher, with desert buttes rising up the page behind it." The printable came back in seconds.

The phrase that did the work was "coming toward the viewer." Asked for an old west train without it, the generator draws the engine from the side, and a side view is a long low band that leaves the top and bottom of a tall page empty. Head on, the funnel climbs into the sky and the cowcatcher sits down on the rail. One thing arrived that nobody asked for: a ribbon banner across the smokestack lettered Coal.

What's in this old west train coloring page

What separates this from the other desert trains online is that the engine is drawn as a face without being given one. The headlight sits where an eye would go, the bell hangs above it like a hat, and the cowcatcher spreads out below like a jaw. Nothing about it is cartoon, and small children still read it as a character.

That helps when one print has to serve a wide age range. A four year old colors a friendly machine, an eight year old colors a real locomotive, and both are looking at the same lines.

The count: the smoke above the stack is built from about ten rounded lobes packed into one cloud, and two smaller clouds float off to the sides. The banner crossing the stack is a ribbon with a forked tail on the right. The bell hangs inside a curved yoke. The headlight is three rings sitting inside each other with about twelve short rays around the outer rim. Two rectangular cab windows sit at shoulder height. The cowcatcher is nine vertical slats between two rails, tapering to a point. Behind the engine stand two flat topped mesas, each ruled with about six vertical lines, and three cacti, the tallest with two raised arms. Six ties run under the rails.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

Leave the smoke white and color the sky around it instead. Smoke is the one thing here that reads better as paper than as pigment, and the ten lobes give the sky an edge to run along.

The mesas want a warmer color family than the engine. Warm rock behind a cool locomotive pushes the buttes back where they belong. Color them the same and the engine flattens into the hillside.

The banner is where to break that rule. It is the only lettered object on the sheet, so filling it strong and keeping everything else soft makes the whole page point at it. Want to color your own? Turn a photo into a coloring page and print the engine from a railroad museum you actually visited.