Model Train Display in Lamy Railroad History Museum
Lamy's storied past came alive Saturday, June 11 when the Lamy Railroad & History Museum and the Santa Fe Model Railroad Club officially unveiled a working museum exhibit that showed the AT&SF trains as they stopped at Lamy with celebrities and ordinary travelers in the middle of the 20th century.
Members of the Santa Fe-based hobby club constructed the
display - complete with scale buildings as they were around the 1940s and
1950s, scenery and authentic locomotives - over the past three years. It includes
an electronic control so visitors to the Museum can start the train pulling
away from the historic Lamy station. The train disappears to the east, then
soon reappears as if coming in from Raton, Kansas City and Chicago. The train
stops again at Lamy, where passengers would have got on and off, and then
heads west to Albuquerque, Flagstaff and Los Angeles. Finally, it returns
to rest in front of the station,the El Ortiz trackside hotel, and other buildings
of the that bygone time. "The Super Chief and El Capitan both made that
famous Chicago-to-L.A. trip. That was in the days when diesel locomotives
were just replacing the old steamers, and both kinds ran on the Atchison,
Topeka and Santa Fe. The line is now known as the Burlington Northern Santa
Fe, and only handles freight delivery. AMTRAK is now the only passenger service
operating on these tracks.
Jeff Taylor, a long-time member of the SFMRRC, supervised the design and construction
of the exhibit. He had the responsibility of seeing that each building, mountain,
bridge, tree and piñon bush are as much like they would have looked
as possible. He also assembled the interactive control electronics. Other
members of the Club undertook replicating individual structures. Dave Jamriska
built the stone church of Our Lady of Light; the one-time Harvey House El
Ortiz hotel is from the hand of Mark Kellerman. Foster Dowell built the station
agent's house. The building that is now the Museum, but was, in 1940, Leo
Pick's General Store, and later the Pink Garter and the Legal Tender, was
built by Bob Spude. Other members laid track and modeled other buildings,
including some that are no longer there. Bob Hayden, prominent nationally
in the model-railroading field, built the now-disappeared coaling tower and
coordinated the meticulous research that gives the display its authentic character;
he also documented the display in photographs.
The Museum is open by appointment; information is available at 466-3325. HO scale, the world's most popular for model railroads, reproduces the world at 1:87, where one inch represents about 7 feet, 6 inches. Buildings, trains, trees, even human figures, all adhere to this scale in the display. Santa Fe and Los Alamos area model-train enthusiasts' area invited to monthly meetings of the SFMRRC, with full information available at the club website.
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