Columbia Gorge Model Railroad Club

What is it about boys and trains? It’s a mystery. I certainly remember as a small child a fascination with model trains. There is the tactile aspect of putting together the track sections. The spatial reasoning of putting together the tracks, where a few parts makes for more than a few routes. Hooking up the electrical elements which have to be complete and solid to work, and make little, but safe sparks, if they are not. Rearranging the engines and cars. And even visiting railroad yards and museums to see the big trains, like the Henry Ford Museum
. When you are 2 – 5 years old, they are all big, except the model trains, where you are the big kid.
Most boys grow out of trains after about age 5. Fortunately, the Columbia Gorge Model Railroad Club members did not. They have built a huge model railroad layout modeled on the real railroads that operate along the Willamette in Portland, in the Columbia Gorge and to Bend.
They have created detailed miniature scenes to go with the tracks and trains. There are scale models of buildings and bridges from the area, including a miniature Portland Steel Bridge and Union Station. There is a miniature drive-​in movie theater, where I’ve heard it used to be possible to watch Netflix outdoors in your car without a wireless connection! I’m not sure what the future of model trains will be with Internet babies
but certainly the resurgence of physical hacking, in the form of Make Magazine and the MakerBot
provides a new opportunity for children to make their own toys.
Of course, no model train layout would be complete without a a small LEGO village, small being about 10 feet on a side, which includes a Statue of Liberty made of copper-​green LEGOS.
I have passed the Model Railroad Club building for years wondering what’s inside. They are open for visitors just a few weekends a year for which they charge admission, including throughout November. I stopped by. There is an entry area, perfect for waiting out of the rain, with exhibits of railroad paraphernalia and a full scale diorama of a railroad switch office. The ticket window has an old ticket machine, that’s what they used to use before Fandango. For the staff, it’s always railroad Halloween.
The train room has an aisle with the model on either side. For people interested in trains who are 3 – 4 feet tall, there is a platform to stand on along sections of the aisle to see those small trains, tracks, buildings and model signals, trees and landscapes up close. Smaller children would require the parental elevator to see the layout.
Taking a cue from Disney, the tour concludes in a café bookstore.
One of the great things about America is the diversity of our obsessions. This obsession of grown ups in Portland to build intricately detailed model train layouts, since 1947, is another example that people have been keeping Portland Weird since before hipsters. I think it’s surreal, but I don’t think children register that. Nor do they have the attention span for obsession. But it’s a great place to bring smaller-​type children for about a half hour to about an hour max to see something they can’t touch.
The Columbia Gorge Model Railroad Club is a place to see trains indoors, in miniature. Visit their website or Facebook for days and hours. They are open just a few times a year on weekends for kids and their grown up parents.