For those who never grew up, the Model Train Show at the Bessemer Civic Center on October 16 and 17 offers a fantasy journey to the strange, Lilliputian land of trains. Weaving through diverse landscapes dominated by miniature downtown buildings, tiny trees, diminutive but cascading mountain ranges, and minuscule hobos hovering around fires, toy trains will whistle and chug to the amusement of both the curious and the enthusiast.

“I got my first set when I was 8 years old,” says Whit Fancher, chairman of The Wrecking Crew, a local model train club. “And like most people, you’re super-involved until you get a car. And then with girls and everything else going on, you kinda get out of the hobby, but the seed has been planted. Once it gets in your blood, it’s there.” The Wrecking Crew, a branch of the Steel City Division, which is a smaller division of the National Model Railroad Association, keeps a model train layout set up in West Lake Mall, where the trains run every Saturday. At both the Bessemer Civic Center and West Lake Mall, 10 model tracks will be available for public viewing the weekend of the show. Clinics for constructing landscapes from scratch (including how to make such native foliage as crape myrtles, oak leaf hydrangeas, and nandinas) will be conducted. “You can make your own trees for a penny, and they look better than any commercial tree you can purchase,” says Fancher.

The Model Train Show pulls into the Bessemer Civic Center on October 16 and 17.

Several sizes of model trains will be on display, including the quarter-inch-high Z scale (“$300 for a locomotive that you can’t see,” laughs Fancher), the popular HO scale [the most familiar], N scale [one inch high], and the mammoth garden railway scale [locomotives up to three feet long that are operated outside]. “Some people just like to run the stuff, some like to build, some like to collect,” explains Fancher, who regards himself as more of a collector and a builder. “I’m not that much of an operator. I can run it around the track a few times, and I start to get bored.”

Fancher admits that model trains can be amazingly elaborate. “You’ll see some hobbyists that construct a building board by board—a little building that may be six inches tall with the same number of pieces of wood as the actual-size structure. They’ll cut the wood themselves and build them from scratch. Some people do that with the cars and locomotives; spend thousands of hours on something that you can buy for $13. It’s really bizarre, people going to that extreme.”

The Model Train Show will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 16, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 17. For more information, call 746-0007.