Coolest Homemade Thomas the Train Boy Costume

When our three year old little boy declared that he wanted to be Thomas the Train for Halloween, we looked at each other and wondered how we were going to pull it off. After some planning and hard work, we think it’s safe to say that we pulled off a Homemade Thomas the Train Boy Costume with flying colors! Our son was ecstatic to say the least!

Our first task was to find the three perfect cardboard boxes. We then cut his Lincoln Logs tube. We painted that black, and then used blue acrylic paint to cover the main box and the small box. It took about 2 coats to cover any writing that was on the box. We then painted the thin rectangular box gray on the top and red on the sides. Once everything was dry, we hot glued the Lincoln Logs tube in place, and the boxes to each other.

Now come the details. We used yellow, black and red acrylic paint for the details. The black and yellow colors covered nicely, but the red required an extra coat or two to really cover the blue. We then cut out most of the other features like the wheels, by making a template on the computer and copying it onto cardboard circles.

We also cut out the bar attached to the wheels and the semi-circle attached to the front side. We then painted these items and let them dry overnight.

While they were drying, we focused on other important details. We used yellow and red foam to cut out the #1 on each side, yellow foam to make the whistles, as well as white and red foam for the light on the back of the box. We painted a paper towel roll black and glued a handful of cotton balls together to stick in the top of the tube for the smokestack. We used a projector at school to make Thomas’ face. We then painted it gray and white afterward, which really made Thomas come alive! We took iced tea mix containers and cut them down so they didn’t stick out too far to make the buffers in the front and back.

We used a glue gun the following weekend to put each detailed part together! We attached the train to our son by buying backpack strap materials at a craft store and cutting them in loops through the box like suspenders. We cinched them in the back with a little piece of rope.

We finished the costume by putting our son in a conductor hat, red turtleneck sweater and bandana. He was the hit of our subdivision parade, preschool party and travels on Halloween. It was certainly a hit. He loved all of the attention that he received and now our only worry is how we are going to top it next year!