Road Trippin' - Part II

After winding our way through a rather small town whose biggest employer is someone named Stryker who has a handful of factories and a shuttle bus from the employee parking and one turn around, we found the Train Barn. In amongst the recent snowfall and the frozen lake that it was on, it was hard to miss the painfully bright red of the barn.

Once we realized that we had to park in the owner's driveway, we headed in and were then met with a lot of things. For a moment, I had horrible flashbacks to when I cleaned out my parents basement before I came to my senses and started exploring. It was part hobby shop and part museum. Big A and I have a horrible habit of going on road trips with little cash and getting into situations where we wish we had some. The Train Barn was on such occasion. Unbeknownst to us, there was a cover charge to see the trains. $3. After scraping everything we could find, we had $5 but at this time, the owner was already upstairs and running the trains so we headed up and worried about it later. It was quite the sight. The 75 year old owner and creator explained how he built most of the buildings to scale and was talking to Big A about ratios when building something to scale which hovered way to close to math so I took off to look around. The most entertaining tidbit was that his wife built most of the landscape and did the painting. I guess they were looking for some kind of joint hobby as well. Below are a few pictures of this renovated hayloft:








And finally, the best of the bunch taken by yours truly:


I loved the trestle and suspension bridges that he had which crossed over an opening down to the first floor along with some type of WWII airplane which you can kind of see behind the train. I can see how this hobby could quickly get out of hand so while I'd love to incorporate them into our design and I enjoyed the trip to the Train Barn (where Big A purchased his first train car - an orange caboose), I really appreciate our little 4'x6' layout.

In case you were wondering, thanks to the purchase of the $12 caboose, we felt a bit better about having to use the ol' Visa for both the price of admission and that. It was surprising to see that in amongst all the old artifacts like the really ancient cash register, the owner pulled out a modern credit card machine.