Los Angeles Union Station’s free train festival celebrates the tiny and the mighty

All aboard! The Los Angeles Union Station’s Train Festival will soon be celebrating the legacy of train travel with a display of historic engines and their tiny, but equally impressive, model train counterparts.

And you don’t even need a boarding pass to check the 2023 edition of the event, which is dubbed “A Celebration of Past, Present & Future,” and pulls into Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles on Sept. 9-10.

“You can spend a day here walking through the model trains displays, a lot of kids love that, as well as get pictures and tour the railroad equipment on the tracks and it’s all in a very public, beautiful building that’s an iconic landmark of Los Angeles,” said Susan Vance, a spokesperson for Union Station.

The free weekend festival at the historic 84-year-old station will include displays of railroad equipment on tracks 13, 14, and 15. People will be able to see engines like the Steam Locomotive Santa Fe 3751, which pulled the first named passenger train into Los Angeles Union Station in 1939.

Also on display will be a diesel locomotive painted in a patriotic red, white, and blue scheme, as well as the Tioga Pass, which was built in 1959 and was designed for railroad executives, plus a 1956 Pullman sleeping car and others. People will also be able to tour the inside a few rail cars.

While the big engines will be impressive, a highlight of the festival will likely be their much smaller versions since the celebration includes five intricately constructed model train displays created by a handful of local model train clubs.

“It is a universe that you have personally created,” said 74-year-old Glendora resident Kim Knight, an avid model train enthusiast and member of the Group 160 NTRAK Club, one of the clubs designing a model train display for the festival.

“You’re providing nostalgia for some people, a chance to see a world and a scene that’s attractive to them and in many cases they’re sharing it with a child or grandchild,” he added.

Like most of his fellow model train lovers, Knight’s passion for locomotives started at a young age when he would see trains pass by his home in Pasadena.

“I was fascinated with them,” he said. “I was fascinated by their size. Some kids were into slot cars, some into radio controlled planes, trains were my thing.”

He built model train displays as a child, but it wasn’t until he was an adult that he got really serious about creating home models again after he got married.

“I went to my wife and said, ‘Honey I have this terrible secret to tell you,” and she was like ‘What? You’re having an affair? You lost all our money in Vegas?’ I said, “No, nothing like that. I had a hobby growing up and I’m really fascinated in getting back into it,’” he said with a chuckle as he recalled the conversation.

Then his wife said the line she’s regretted saying ever since: “Well, how bad can that be?”

Now in his garage, Knight houses an 8-by-5-foot set that depicts the Donner Pass with recreations of mountains, trees and even a river where he runs a 35-car freight train that’s about 12-feet long. Besides that set, Knight also has ones that recreate orange groves that even include a crop dusting plane flying over trees and a looming tornado cloud.

“Most guys that are model railroaders, most spend their time in their garages, or basements or spare bedrooms and occasionally they come up for air. So you might not know that the guy living next to you has this huge empire in his house,” Knight said.

While model trains can be purchased with period-correct details, there is still a lot of customization that can be done to get them to look just like the real deal.

“You will find things like sunshades, bells,” Knight said. And with the latest advent, digital command control, people can also add specific engine sounds and lights, he added.

And for serious train buffs, which Knight said are known as rivet counters, attention to detail is key.

“These are guys that can tell you whether or not the engine that’s in front of them is prototypically correct, if it has the right unit number on it, the right configuration of bells or whistles on the top or air conditioning units,” he said.

His club, which has members throughout Southern California, specializes in model train layouts geared toward landscapes depicting the Pacific Northwest with scenery that include rivers, trees, mountain ranges and small towns with N-Scale models of steam, diesel and modern engines rolling through on the rails.

“If you took 160 of our scale locomotives and put them nose to tail that would be the length of a real locomotive,” Knight said.

At the Union Station festival they will showcase a 16-by-28-foot three-track mainline layout that will include a working tornado, scenery depicting the U.S. Pacific Northwest along with rural scenes and 40-car long trains. Guests will even get a chance to operate a model train.

“It’s going to be a big event and we’re so honored we were selected to come down and do this,” Knight said. “The fact that we’re also going to be at Union Station, to be part of a historical and cultural event for us is a really big deal.”

Los Angeles Union Station’s Train Festival

When: 10 a.m.- 6 p.m. Sept. 9-10

Where: Union Station, 800 North Alameda Street, Los Angeles

Tickets: Free admission; for more information, go to unionstationla.com.