Model railroad delighted us with details

A gondola trundled skiers to the mountain top, while others zoomed down the steep snowy slopes and trains rumbled around the base, through tunnels and across trestle bridges. This enchanting miniature scene greeted us at the Osoyoos Desert Model Railroad.

Despite its name, the tiny model railroad world doesn’t depict the desert that surrounds the small town of Osoyoos in southcentral British Columbia. Rather, it transported us to the alpine countries of Europe – Germany, Austria or Switzerland. We traveled vicariously, imagining schussing down and into an icicle-bedecked chalet for fondue and kirsch.

“We’re going to be here a long time at this rate,” Bill said after 15 minutes, when we’d progressed only about 10 feet along the enormous model displayed in a warehouse. The sets are built about three feet off the ground, with sparkling-clean glass panels to protect the models from straying fingers.

A train carrying army tanks passed us and disappeared into a tunnel. Moving around the ski hill and the grand train station, we found an army training camp, with tiny soldiers crawling through mud and climbing through an obstacle course.

Like kids, we exclaimed and pointed out tiny features to each other. I looked around – we were the only visitors; the other couple had left. I wished there had been some children so I could see their reactions. Are they too inured to the constant action of video games to be enchanted by this miniature world? I hoped they’d be as thrilled as we were.

Visiting the model railroad takes time – double the hour we’d thought we’d spend – and even then, we likely missed a lot. It’s the kind of place you could return to several times to take it all in. If you rushed, you’d miss many delightful scenes.

The stats raised our eyebrows:

• 45 computer-controlled trains
• 2 kilometres of track
• 4,000 square feet of model towns, mountains, and rolling countryside
• 20,000 hand-painted people and animals
• 1,900 buildings
• 1:87 HO scale, which means 3.5 millimetres to 1 foot, the most popular scale for model trains
• North America’s largest Märklin train layout

Trains carried logs, passengers, cars, beer kegs, grain, shipping containers, wind turbine blades, and various liquids. They curved around the towns, crossed trestle and suspension bridges, pulled into stations and stopped for a moment, then started up and disappeared into tunnels.

I stood for a while waiting for the army tank train to emerge from a certain tunnel, but my prediction was wrong; it trundled into view across the valley. Obviously, there’s a complex track design underneath the scenery, with many levels and switches.

The founder, Poul Pedersen (I recognized him from photos on the website), came along and asked if we’d seen the Try Me buttons, just below the glass shields. No, we hadn’t. He waved a hand over the sensor, which activated tiny moving figures.

“The organ grinder is the toughest to find,” he said, pointing to the small figure about two feet in from the edge in a farmer’s market scene.

We saw Oktoberfest dancers, a brewery, garden centres with miniscule flowers, workers building new tracks, a hillside winery with grape pickers, several wedding scenes outside cathedrals, and European car dealerships – Porsche, Mercedes Benz, Smart, Rolls Royce.

We tested another Try Me button and the blades spun on a helicopter atop a hospital. Nearby was a tiny soapbox derby, a train derailment, and a bungee jumper hanging from a suspension bridge over a river with rapids. A photographer’s flash went off. Prisoners in orange jumpsuits stood at windows and walked in the yard outside. 

We chatted with Poul several times during our visit. Bill described how he, his father and two brothers had begun building a model railroad with a mountain scene on a 4×8 sheet of plywood but had never finished.

“That’s how I started 50 years ago,” Poul said with a chuckle. He had been bitten by the train bug as a child in Denmark but could only begin seriously collecting as an adult. After marrying Ulla, he enlisted her help to assemble the houses and paint the tiny people and animals, which she continues to do despite rheumatic arthritis.

After moving several times, the couple wound up in Osoyoos 39 years ago, along with all the train paraphernalia. The model railroad was a hobby until they decided to open it to the public in its current warehouse location in 2003. It continues to be a family affair. With help from their daughter Lotte, son-in-law Joe Mendes, and grandson Dane, the model railroad has become a top B.C. attraction.

The 45 trains that moved constantly around the tracks were cool, but it was the detail in the hundreds of tiny scenes that fascinated me. And it wasn’t all storybook perfection: we saw house fires, train derailments, car collisions with police cars on the scene, a cyclist-car collision with paramedics attending, and a mountain-side forest fire.

In a few places, the model was cut away on the side so we could see beneath the surface: a mining scene, a subway station, and an underwater view with a dolphin, submersible headed towards a sunken ship, scuba divers and a mermaid.

Suddenly, the overhead lights dimmed and all the tiny lights in the displays cast a warm glow. A nighttime thunderstorm rumbled in one corner. The ski hill lit up for night skiing. The carnival scene caught our eyes; the lit ferris wheel took tiny visitors for a ride, as did the tilt-a-wheel, merry-go-round, drop zone, scrambler and bumper cars.

Poul and Ulla clearly have a sense of humour. Another Try Me button labelled ‘Nature’s Call!’ activated a wee man peeing into a bush. We found several topless women by beaches and pools and there was a nudist camp with al fresco swimming and sunbathing.   

“Most of the houses come from Germany and most of them are replicas of buildings that exist in Germany,” Ulla said in a video interview with KSPS Public Television. “So when we get visitors from Germany and Austria or Switzerland they say to Poul ‘Oh, I know this building.’ And it’s just fun that we have this connection.”

Unfortunately, visitor attendance is down 30 percent from usual due to Covid, mainly because American tourists aren’t crossing the border just a few kilometres away.

Shipping containers in train yards sported real-life names like Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd. Another Try Me button activated a city worker who popped up from a manhole with the cover held over his head. Punk rockers with wee mohawks strutted their stuff. Hot air balloons floated overhead. Planes landed and took off at the airport behind the fairgrounds.

A bus moved along the road, stopping at traffic lights and to pick up passengers. Poul told us the battery-powered bus follows a wire laid into the wood road; magnets adjust the steering.

A couple took a selfie with a flash. Two movie theatres played oldies: Gone with the Wind and African Queen. A cemetery hosted two funerals. A stork flew around its nest.

Poul flipped open various access doors to get at the track and equipment underneath. Maintenance work includes a lot of cleaning, including wiping the glass windows every day and vacuuming the scenery. Poul invented a tiny, finger-sized vacuum nozzle with small brush hairs on the end. To access the scenes for vacuuming or maintenance, he lies on a special gurney he invented – looking much like a hospital over-the-bed tray table – that hangs out over the mini-world.

There’s no room to expand the model railroad any further, since it fills the top floor of the warehouse, but each year they choose an area to upgrade or refurbish.

Nighttime fell again and a sex shop lit up near a bowling alley. Ladies of the night plied their trade. Firefighters battled the blaze on the last mountainside. At the very end, a drive-in movie theatre played a video about the model railroad that’s available to buy in the gift shop.

Downstairs, the shop sold a wide variety of train-related clothing, toys, games, puzzles, trains and scenery sets. And as a connoisseur of pamphlets, I can verify that theirs is top-notch: it includes a punch-out model train engine to assemble. They’ve thought of everything.