Published: November 14, 2009 08:18 pm      

Tiny trains carry tons of fun at Rail Fest

BLUEFIELD — Children stand tiptoe and peek into miniature worlds while adults around them talk in terms of track gauges, wheel sensors and other pieces of the model train world at the 21st Annual Rail Fest.

Model train displays and vendors converged Saturday at the Herb Sims Youth Center to attract model train enthusiasts from across the Virginias. The exhibition continues today from noon until 5 p.m. Admission is $5 per person or $10 for a family.

“We’ve had a very good turnout,” Kelley Massie, president of the National Railway Historical Society Pocahontas Chapter said as another family entered the show.

Train travel and the trains themselves still fascinate people in an age of cars and jets. To fuel this interest, people come to Rail Fest every year and mark it on their calendars so they won’t miss it, Massie said.

Many of the visitors recall the journeys they took by rail.

“I want to say it’s a time when rail travel was romanticized, and people enjoy traveling by rail, and it’s still been popular over the last century,” Massie said. “I know people tell us about all the trips they have been on and how they enjoyed seeing the country. You just don’t have to worry about anything when you’re on a train.”

Trains often invoke childhood memories of rail travel and visits to places where a father or grandfather worked. One vendor from Monroe County recalled how his love of trains was inspired.

“From a personal point of view, my grandfather worked for the C & O, and I’d go down to where he worked,” said Joe Haynes of Union. “Railroads have always held a fascination with me. And it’s a heck of a machine.”

Miniature trains hummed and chugged through tiny worlds featuring tunnels, ravines, towns, lakes, pastures and forests. In one display, a welder’s tiny blowtorch flashes as he works on a locomotive in a repair depot. Further down the track, one encounters a town and then a circus complete with big top tents, elephants and a circus train.

Lowell Walters of Lynchburg, Va., took time away from his own display to show his daughter, Savannah, the accuracy of the little circus. Ten-year-old Savannah liked the circus, and she had her own ideas for a train display.

“I think I’d like a little town with a parade going through it,” she said.

While the Rail Fest miniatures didn’t have a parade, it’s possible to create one, her father revealed. A rotating belt allows tiny figures to “march” through a town.

In another section of the same exhibit, 8-year-old William Allen of Princeton wanted to do something before he left show — a white diesel locomotive and cars were preparing to pull out.

“I want to see the whole thing go around,” he said, setting off to keep pace as the train started counterclockwise round the display. It threaded through a tunnel as another train came through.

“Whoa!” William said as his mother, Alice Allen, followed him. He trotted alongside the train as it went through more tunnels, passed the ravine, passed the circus, cut through towns and headed back to its starting point.

And then that train’s lap was done.

“These trains go really fast!” William said as he threw up his hands. “Now we can go!”

— Contact Greg Jordan at gjordan@bdtonline.com