Railroad enthusiasts reveal tiny world of their own

Ron Petersen keeps his ambitions small in retirement. Tiny, even, as he displays his miniature trainscape at the model train show on Sunday.

Every detail, from the sandy bricks lining the front of the historic city hall to the toothpick-size wrought-iron posts surrounding the miniature cemetery next door, was created piece by piece in painstaking detail. Petersen, a lifelong train enthusiast, is selling off many of his kits and scenes and focusing on helping his friends build up their train tracks.

“I don’t always follow what the kit says to do,” he said. “You can be creative, and that’s what I like about it.”

Petersen, one of the more than 1,000 attendees at the Spokane Model Train Show on Sunday at the Spokane County Fairgrounds & Expo Center in Spokane Valley, said he makes almost all of his scenes that miniature trains wind through out of wood. The only plastic or metal pieces incorporated into the landscape are pinky-nail-sized plastic figurines, vehicles and animals that dot his landscapes, as well as the glue and string that hold his structures together.

Petersen, who has lived in Spokane since retiring from the U.S. Air Force, said his detailed landscapes aren’t based on any one image or historical location, they’re a unique reimagining of scenes a train might travel through in real life. He said every detail, such as the fake, stubby grass over hilly and flat landscapes, painted false rockscapes and thimble-size outhouses that sit a few inches away from vintage buildings, takes months to build.

“We try to model these off the real world,” he said.

Petersen and his friend Jim O’Neill, another vendor at the show, are building a replica of Wolf Creek Canyon in Montana at O’Neill’s Coeur d’Alene home. One of the rooms in O’Neill’s home has been turned into a train room, with walls painted to look like a cloudy sky and tables with train tracks that run through a still-in-progress rocky canyon.

“It’s spectacular scenery,” he said.

Many train enthusiasts and collectors in the area have specialties. Petersen considers himself a craftsman, spending months placing, and painting, each board for every tiny house that he builds. Mike Tietz, a member of the River City Modelers train club and an event organizer, said his specialty is model landscaping.

Tietz said one of the biggest draws of the event is a train that traveled through a landscape large enough to dominate roughly half of an expo center room. He said attendees created the railroad and landscape that day by bringing their own tables and standardized tracks to connect together.

The rail lines consisted of about 1,000 feet of track, and the landscape was made from 12 collectors’ sections. The trains drove past tiny grain silos, barns, scenes from Canada and throughout a miniature West and crossed a bridge that spanned a miniature “river.”

Some collectors attend events because the conventions give them the space they don’t have at home for their displays, Tietz said.

Collaboration and inspiration draw people to the convention, he said. Joining a train club and building tracks alongside other collectors gave him a chance to learn new skills and start friendships.

The Spokane train show happens twice a year, in the spring and fall, and another show is scheduled in Lewiston on March 24.