Model train display brings back memories

June Sirota leaned in close and bent her head sideways waiting for the telltale, clackety-clack sound of a model train coming down the tracks toward her.

As the bright-red electric passenger train approached, Sirota waved excitedly and exclaimed, "Whoo-whoo. Whoo-whoo. Whoo-whoo."

The 74-year-old Summerlin resident had the joy of a 6-year-old getting her first glimpse of a model train Thursday morning as she took in the Christmas Run 2012 train display operated by the Las Vegas Garden Railway Society at Jim Marsh Automotive, a Kia, Mitsubishi and Suzuki dealership located at 8555 Centennial Parkway. Although closed today, the Christmas train display will run Wednesday and Thursday.

"This is wonderful," Sirota said, as she admired the trains and the detailed scenery of homes and businesses that line the tracks. "I'm having a good time. Oh, the good old days! This has really been fun for me."

The display, she said, brings back memories of her own kids' childhoods.

"I like to see that it's operational because I'm remembering when my kids were small and I tried to set up trains. I did eventually set it up, but the trains kept falling off the track because I didn't know how to do it properly. This is a beautiful display."

Sirota has a special memory from her own childhood growing up in upstate New York. "When I was a girl, my father took me to Annapolis on the train. I guess I was about 10. That was my first real train ride, and it was very exciting. There was a dining car, and we had breakfast on the train, but I never got to sleep on the train."

Reactions like Sirota's aren't uncommon when visitors see the 50-foot by 20-foot display, said Chuck McManus, a member of the railway society, which has grown from about a half-dozen members in 1991 to approximately 100 members today.

"Everybody loves trains," he said. "Even kids today who have never seen a real train still love trains."

Adults and children alike are fascinated by trains, said McManus, who got his first electric train when he was 4.

"You always have two questions from little kids. Question one: Can you make it go faster? And question two: Can you make it wreck?"

McManus owns the train Sirota was admiring. It's a model of a passenger train still in operation in Switzerland. "It runs all over Switzerland," he said. "I rode it. It's a wonderful train."

He said he's thankful to dealership owner Jim Marsh for letting the society take over his showroom for its Christmas Run display, which began Dec. 16. "Jim has been wonderful to us. He's a very community-oriented person, and he does an awful lot of things that people don't know he does," McManus said.

Marsh said he's happy to move the four or five cars usually in the showroom to make room for the display.

"It's just kind of a community thing," he said, adding, "Like everybody else, I love trains."

The display, in its third year at the dealership, draws its share of young and old, Marsh said. "Grandparents bring their grandkids, and the grandparents love it more than their grandkids," he said. "They all tell about how they had a Lionel train when they were kids and had it around their Christmas tree. I think they use their grandkids as an excuse to come see it themselves."

The display is always changing, because railway society members bring in different trains to run at different times. "They'll bring their trains in, and they'll run them for two or three hours and then they'll take them down and someone else will run their train, so there's always something different."
The reactions of children are great, said Rik Edwards, a railway society board member-at-large. "Their eyes get big, and they follow them around (the track)," he said. One member brought a train carrying a load of candy canes and Hershey's Kisses. "It goes slow, and the kids can reach in and grab one," he said.

Earlier in the week, a group of autistic kids visited the display.

"They come down every year and they just love this," he said. "They just go nuts."

For Sirota, a visit to the train display has her dreaming of a different train adventure.

"Whenever I saw movies about people sleeping on a train, I'd wish it could be me," she said. "That's one of my plans for the future - to take a train trip somewhere out West, I don't know where yet, probably on the coast or near the Grand Canyon and sleep over."