Take a closer look at the Sierra Pacific Lines – this time in motion!
Railroad Magic – Pasadena Model Railroad Museum
“Railroad Magic is a short documentary film which follows members of a model train club in Pasadena, California on their annual open house day. This event invites the public into one of the largest HO-scale model railroad layouts in the world. It is the creation of a community which accepts imagination from people of all ages. Model railroading is about preserving the rich history and the timeless magic of trains.”
The Pasadena Model Railroad Museum née Club is well-known enough to even have been featured in a Pentrex production, back in 1990. Back then, the layout was still a DC analogue system, and required even more hands on deck than it does it its current DCC digital format. This video is a taste of what you can expect to see in the full Pentrex video.
The large size of the Museum’s layout allows for some seriously monster-sized trains. Although they are impractical for use in group operating sessions, it is entirely possible to run prototypical-length trains at Pasadena. In this video, Chris Holt, an avid intermodal fan, demonstrates the lengths, literally, to which one can go on a 5,000 square foot layout.
Pasadena is also a great place to for model railroaders to flex their prototype skills. Here, Chris Holt’s Southern Pacific TankTrain, which has been further refined since the creation of this video, crawls across the layout, several thousand tons of crude oil in tow.
Pasadena isn’t all about prototypicality, though. Where some clubs are famous for allowing only a very narrow selection of railroading history on their layouts, Pasadena has always been more about the joy and fun that can be found in model railroading than counting the rivets. This means that all sorts of equipment mixes during operating sessions, and even in individual trains.