All aboard: Colorado Model Railroad Museum ‘a place of joy’

GREELEY — There is a certain joy with which the executive director of the Colorado Model Railroad Museum in Greeley describes this place.

“My daughter (Anna) and I came here for a fundraising event soon after it was built,” recalled Michelle Kempema, amid an interview intermittently disrupted by chuckling with her guests over another found dinosaur in the 5,500 square feet of scenic Rocky Mountain model railway. “We were both just floored with this place, and she asked me, ‘Why can’t you volunteer here?’
“Women and little girls fall in love with trains, as well as little boys.”

Kempema worked for five years as a volunteer after the 2009 opening before taking one of the two paid position for the museum, which is awesomely located along two working rail lines at 680 10th St. She said founder Dave Trussell, former owner of the Greeley Tribune and some 25 other newspapers, had only one instruction for running the place.

“He said, ‘I want the place to be fun – to always be a place of joy.’ ”

Judging by the laughter of children and adults alike during the course of the interview, that apparently is still true.

Trussell already was recognized as one of the leading model railroaders in the nation when he started building this track in 2004. Five years and 45,000 volunteer hours later, most of the track – based on a logging railroad, the Oregon, California and Eastern Railway – was complete.
“The first newspaper he owned after coming home from Vietnam was actually located (in south-central Oregon) where he could see that railroad every day,” Kempema said. While Trussell, who now lives in Pennsylvania, owned newspapers across the West, Kempema said his favorite community was always Greeley, and he still has a home here while volunteering at the museum as well.

The HO-scale railroad – dubbed “the finest model railroad I’ve ever seen” by Jim Hediger, the 30-year senior editor of Model Railroader magazine – also probably is the second-longest model railroad in the   world. Hamburg, Germany, spent some $50 million to house the largest model railroad, but Kempema said that a number of guests who have seen both prefer the Greeley line.
Actually, the three-dimensional Rocky Mountain backdrop includes several branches of the OC&E line, but the mainline is 1,353 actual feet long, or 20.5 miles in HO scale. The 3-D scenery includes mountain vistas, a number of rivers and such detailed craftsmanship as 21-millimeter people fighting fires, working the yards and even attending a carnival.
Visitors can stroll through much of the scenery, which includes 28,000 handmade trees of various species, and can accommodate more than 2,300 rail cars and 300 engines at any given moment.

But keeping track of moments here is tricky, because every minute is only 15 seconds long.
“We are so detailed that we actually shrink time, so we can condense a full day of the railroad into six hours,” Kempema said. “We are the only model railroad that actually includes a dispatcher.”
The dispatcher actually works a real-life railroad trafficking device from 1975, but he can’t do the job alone. Every day the museum is open – Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the winter – it requires from 10 to 15 engineers to run their own trains along the lines.

“A lot of these guys actually worked on real railroads, and they come from Cheyenne down to Colorado Springs,” Kempema said. “Usually they work in groups; today is Cheyenne day, I think I’ve got 10 or 12 from up there, but Saturdays are usually guys from Colorado Springs or Denver.”

Any given day also can see a number of international visitors and as many as 350 total guests at the height of the tourism season. That’s why it may be best for Coloradans to come during winter. During weekdays 50 visitors is more of a normal day during the off season.
But just don’t come expecting a normal day. Any given day is going to include at least a few games for the kid in all of us, including “Spot the Dinosaur.”

“That’s actually an historical thing,” Kempema said. “Model railroaders in Colorado have always hidden dinosaurs along their scenery.”

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