Model Railroads

XKCD gives us this on Model Railroads

The Twin Cities (being the "Twin" Cities) has at least two major Model Railroad Clubs:

• Twin City Model Railroad Museum at Bandana Square

• The Hennepin Overland Railway Historical Society on 38th Street in Minneapolis

The Bandana Square club and layout is larger, and is more geared for visitors as a museum, while the other is very much oriented to its members with some support for letting non-members view the layout. (As visitors we were more tolerated than beloved). Both have fantastically detailed landscapes.

Model railroads hold special fascination for many in and out of the transportation community. Both the encapsulation of a community at a particular point in history (usually a time (1920s-1950s) when both diesels and steam engines ran, so that the landscape is appropriate to models of alternative locomotive technologies), and the motion of the trains themselves, complex yet predictable.

There is a certainty in nostalgia, especially a nostalgia of trains which cannot deviate from their tracks. The towns are inevitably small towns (though there may also be a big city), where each business is named for its purported proprietor. The ugly-ness of the real landscape is somehow tolerable as a model. The gas station in a model railroad is quaint, clean, and interesting, as it would be in an ad from the era, not how we imagine it today. Also, it is almost always summer in model railroad layouts.

Choo Choo Bob's Train Store also deserves a shout out, a store with its own TV show.