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…
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