On the elevator at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park, I met my first model railroad worker, in a railroad jacket and an engineer’s cap. “Do you work here?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “It took me 80 years to get a paying job playing with model trains. But you can’t tell anyone I said that!”
Between a small paid staff and a host of volunteers, the museum truly lives the old song about ‘working on the railroad.’ All during my visit I found adults playing with trains, building scenery, wiring exhibits and doing maintenance.
In fact, one of my favorite moments was watching several people cleaning the glass that surrounds many of the model railroads; one tall woman cleaned the upper part of the glass while another in a wheelchair cleaned the bottom.
The glass, though, is an issue. I have far fewer good pictures than I had hoped because of the glass and its reflections. Use flash, and there are flares all over the picture. Suppress flash, and it’s difficult to stop motion of the speedy trains and still get good landscape. Here’s a sample.
The museum is one of the largest indoor model railroad exhibits anywhere, and is actually the work of four different model associations which built and maintain their displays. Among them, they’ve built 5 different layouts in different gauges, all of them running at least some trains all the time.
The most incredible, and one that’s still being worked on, is the model of the Southern Pacific/Santa Fe lines from Bakersfield to Mojave, California in the 1950s, including crossing the mountains through the Tehachapi Pass, where the locomotive of a long train would pass the tail, but 77 feet higher up the mountain.
It’s in HO scale (1:87). The builders have used thousands of photographs and documents to make it almost perfectly accurate. Watching the construction process that’s still going on is fascinating. In fact, while I enjoyed the illusion of the miniature models, my favorite parts were peering backstage where the operation is controlled and built.
Here are some views of the work that goes into shaping and ‘dressing’ the lines for display; it’s intricate work!
In the completed sections of all the railroads, it’s fun to see not just the trains, but the detailed backgrounds, towns and buildings. There’s quite a bit of detail—old-fashioned buses and trucks, carefully reproduced signs, buildings and platform figures.
Some is built from kits or bought, but most is handmade. And with that comes the opportunity for a joke or two, including a drive-in theatre with a tiny screen showing cartoons, an auto junkyard and even a traffic accident.
And a superhero intervention, and nostalgia bits for those of us old enough to remember how we got our freight before FedEx.
There are also some models not quite the size you’d set up in your basement. The one at the top is an actual working steam engine, built from scratch over a 22-year period. That’s the builder, taking a ride, in the second picture.
And for a little quiz to end it off. Here are three pictures of the San Diego Union Station…can you correctly identify which ones are model or real?
There are clues…but they’ve done quite a job! Well worth a visit.
San Diego Model Railroad Museum is one of 17 museums along the Prado in Balboa Park, San Diego, and there’s a combination ticket available at any of the museums that gets you into all. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday.
