Visitors walk through a narrow aisle, surrounded by replicas of familiar places such as east Portland, Bend and Troutdale. When night falls in the room, as it does each hour, the cityscape lights up until the sun rises slowly behind a relief of Mount Hood.
At the kickoff Saturday of a month of shows at the group's clubhouse in Portland, most visitors were children accompanied by parents. Henry Stewart, 8, has attended both weekend shows all month the past couple of years. He chattered to anyone who would listen about how to identify one train from another.
"I know basically everything that's going on," he said.
His mom, Angela Stewart of Tigard, said he left the womb talking about trains.
"This wasn't something we planned," she said. "His room was decorated in Winnie the Pooh and he came out liking trains."
Kids can become members of the club when they are 12. Chris Dumas of Camas, Wash., is almost there.
The 11-year-old plans to join next year. His interest in trains started young, with cartoons such as Thomas the Tank Engine. Now he likes model diesel trains "because they're more modern." He and his dad set up a model track at home, but Chris admires the tiny details of the club's world.
The club created a scavenger hunt for the show to draw kids into the details, telling them to find things such as popular British sci-fi show "Doctor Who" icons.
"Every time I come in this room, I see something I've never seen before," club member Tom Farnsworth said, as he watched a train he was operating chug away on a mountain in tiny Lyle, Wash.
The details in the sets are inventive. Apples in trees are made out of the innards of medicine capsules. A bluebird smaller than a thumb sits in a birdhouse. Even the bigger pieces, such as a custom-built model of Portland's Union Station and the Vista House in the Columbia River Gorge circa 1955, are meticulously detailed.
"People come here and walk through in 10 minutes and say, 'Well, that's great,'" club member Russell Lusk of Tigard said. "But you didn't see 10 percent of it."
Underneath the showroom lie hundreds of miles of colorful wires, looped and bundled to connect the tracks to switchboards, which are manned by operators who talk on headsets to two dispatchers in the bowels of the building. They watch the trains via mini-cameras, ensuring everything runs smoothly.
There are about 1,500 train cars on the tracks at any given time during the show.. The set-up allows 52 club members to work the trains at one time.
View full sizeA crowd gathered to look toward Portland as it looked in the 1950s with Union Station in the foreground. A four-week run of the Columbia Gorge Model Railroad Club opened to the public on Saturday.Tammy Auburg of Vancouver was a conductor Saturday morning, but she also is one of few members who build circuit boards, each of which controls one of the 26 blocks of tracks.
She joined the model club about a decade after her husband, when her children started high school, "and I've been chugging ever since." She likes all the stories that go along with trains.
"I always used that as a way to teach my kids history about the country," she said.
Auburg is one of the few female members. Even most visitors Saturday were boys. But, Annika Mayne, 10, of Portland still plans to join the club when she turns 12.
She always wanted to operate the controls but also likes watching the trains run.
"I like looking at all the little details inside," she said.
The club meets at 7 p.m. every Tuesday, and welcomes visitors. Members are trained for each position, so Henry's professed level of train knowledge isn't required, just his enthusiasm.
"Initially, I was very nervous," said Farnsworth, who has been with the club six years. "But now I have a lot of fun operating trains."
-- Molly Harbarger: 503-294-5923
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