First, eat a good breakfast.
Cheerios and Wheaties are good choices. Save the boxes and cut them into strips, shape into a mountain and glue them together. Add plaster casting material and paint, then add trees, bushes, grass and a herd of inch-tall caribou looking down at the train running along the base.
For members of the Tanana Valley Model Railroad Club, the train’s the thing. The rest is theater on an HO scale. Their layout at the Alaska Railroad Depot on the Johansen Expressway is a series of Alaska Railroad scenes from Denali Park north in exquisite detail, down to the moose in Horseshoe Lake.
“It transcends a hobby,” says member Bill Reed. “It’s art.”
Everything is built by hand.
The trees alone take about an hour apiece, but they look like Alaska black spruce trees. The rock cliffs in the Nenana Canyon look as if they could slide over the tracks at any time, which they have a tendency to do in real life. The mountain made of cereal boxes is a replica of Mount Healy, overlooking the Nenana River.
Clif Lando is the club’s “water man.” He created the various ponds and the Nenana River, down to realistic ripples and rapids. The only thing missing is the wet.
When designing the layout, the club set the track first and designed the scenery around it, giving the members “godlike powers” to reverse rivers and condense bridges and tunnels to fit, Lando said with a laugh.
The Mears Bridge in Nenana is represented, as is the former Samson Hardware building in Fairbanks and a North Pole refinery.
The “Route of the Baby Moose Gooser” runs 120 days annually, generally during the summer tourist season. Three trains can run at one time, winding from the Moody Tunnel — preserved here although it was imploded years ago — through Nenana and Fairbanks. Much of the layout is a work in progress.
The club, which was formed in 1984, has about a dozen active members, Ron Gatterdam said, and is always looking for more. They meet Tuesdays at 7 p.m. at the railroad depot. For more information, visit http:// tvmrr.org/index.html or call Gatterdam at 479-0651.
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