Spend a night at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum with the Winnipeg Model Railroad Club on January 14

Ken Beuhler, Executive Director of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum, is seen in front of Union       Pacific's Big Boy, which made a stop in Duluth at the museum in 2019.

The WMRC having a night at the museum! Ken Beuhler, Executive Director of the Lake Superior Railroad Museum is going to conduct a tour of  this spectacular museum just for us! The museum was founded in the late 1960s and gained traction with the preservation of the Northern Pacific's Union Depot in downtown Duluth by the Museum's founders. They saved the building and created an Arts Culture and History Center. It made the front cover of TIME magazine when it opened. USA Today voted the Museum the "Best Transportation Museum in America." The museum has become one of the major tourist attractions in the Duluth Superior Region. In 2019, it hosted the Union Pacific’s “Big Boy”, which attracted 12,000 rail fans.

Dave MacLean, long time member and past president of the Model Railroad Club of Toronto, will showcase his club, one of the oldest in North America. Having forced to move in 2013 from its former 67 year run in a former WW2 era munitions factory, the Club is now in its fourth home. Since 2013, Club members have been building a new 3500 square foot layout featuring multiple deck construction, mushroom design concepts, soaring bridges over aisles, and walk in design to all areas. The Club  embraces traditional and new technology such as DCC/JMRI/WiThrottle to allow use of handheld devices for control of trains and turnouts. Recently 3D printing has been adopted. The layout features a mainline length of over 8 scale miles with full staging yards, with two major terminals to allow transition era Canadian railroad operations, with walk-along timetable passenger and waybill freight operations. The layout is fully signaled according to the 1960 Canadian Railway Operating Rules with full dispatcher functionality. 

The meeting takes place on Friday, January 14 at 7:00 PM. Due to COVID concerns, this will be an on-line only meeting on Zoom. We will be holding our member’s monthly model display. All members have received a Zoom link for this meeting. If you are not a member and wish to receive a link, email us at wmrc.train club@gmail.com and we will send you a link.

      An O scale CP passenger rounds the corner at the Model Railroad Club of Toronto's layout.

Twin Citiy Model Railroad Museum is closing

A fine example of some of the amazing modelling work done by the Twin City Model Railroad Museum in St. Paul, Minnesota. Photo by Paul Ullrich.

Our good friend and long time WMRC member sent us some sad news last week, The Twin City Model Railroad Museum in St. Paul, Minnesota is closing. The museum, which has been around for an amazing 81 years in several locations, is $30,000 in debt. They just can't pay their rent, and to make matters worse, it would cost about $50,000 to move the layout to another location.

This museum has been the highlight for many Winnipeg model railroad buffs when they visit Minneapolis -St. Paul. In addition to their massive scale O gauge layout, they had recently included a separate toy train display in another building next to their Bandana Square location, which was formerly the Northern Pacific Railway's Como passenger car shops.

The museum is slated to close today, but members hope that they will be allowed to stay open for the the Christmas season so it can earn some much needed revenue. Their toy train will be closing on November 15. 

For more information about the Twin City Model railroad Museum, and its closing, you can see John Longhurst's many posts about it by clicking here. To read an article about the closing of the museum from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, click here. To visit the Twin City Model railroad Museum's website, please click here.

 Just one of the Twin City Model Railroad Museum's toy train layouts. Photo by Paul Ullrich.

 Another more realistic 3-rail O gauge hi-rail layout was also a part of their toy train display, which was house in a separate building in Bandana Square. Regular visitor to the area will recognize many of the city's famous most famous building to the far left of the image. Photo by Paul Ullrich.