Railway Experiences
Railway museums & scenic rides. Discover curated immersive railway experiences around the world — museums, heritage rides, and themed rail tours.
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Featured experiences
Age of Steam Roundhouse Museum
The Age of Steam Roundhouse Museum sits on a 34-acre site on Smokey Lane Road SW outside Sugarcreek, in the heart of Ohio's Tuscarawas County Amish Country. At its center is a fully operational, 18-stall brick roundhouse wrapped around a 115-foot turntable — described as the first large roundhouse built in the United States since 1951, when Nickel Plate Road completed its Calumet Yard roundhouse (Trains magazine, 2010). Architect F. A. Goodman designed the roughly 48,000-square-foot building with solid masonry walls and heavy timber framing, making it one of the largest heavy-timber structures in America. The roundhouse and its collection are the legacy of Jerry Joe Jacobson (1943–2017), a board-certified nurse anesthetist and U.S. Army veteran who built the Ohio Central Railroad System. Jacobson began operating the Ohio Central in 1988 and ran steam-powered passenger excursions between Sugarcreek and Baltic starting in 1989. When he sold the Ohio Central System to Genesee & Wyoming in 2008, he kept his collection of vintage locomotives and rolling stock, bought 34 acres in Sugarcreek, and built the roundhouse to house them; the building was completed around 2010 and the steam locomotives were moved inside in 2011. The museum is owned and operated by the Jerry & Laura Jacobson Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit endowed to preserve the collection. Today the roundhouse shelters what is described as one of the largest private collections of steam locomotives in the world, alongside historic diesels, passenger cars, freight equipment and cabooses. In September 2025 the museum acquired its 25th steam locomotive, Chesapeake & Ohio 2-6-6-2 No. 1308 — the only articulated steam locomotive in the collection.
The WonderWorks by Hornby Hobbies
The WonderWorks by Hornby Hobbies is an indoor hobby attraction on the Westwood Industrial Estate in Margate, Kent, housed in the factory that has been home to Hornby Hobbies since 1954. It opened in late October 2023 as a reimagining of the former Hornby Visitor Centre, which had operated on the same site from July 2010. Hornby Hobbies traces its roots to 1901, when founder Frank Hornby patented the Meccano construction toy in Liverpool; the company produced its first clockwork train in 1920 and launched its first OO-gauge Hornby Dublo range in 1938. The attraction brings together the five model-making brands now owned by Hornby Hobbies: Hornby model railways, Scalextric slot racing, Airfix plastic kits, Corgi die-cast models and Pocher large-scale kits. The centrepiece Hornby World is a multi-track OO-gauge layout that runs from rural steam-era scenes through to modern high-speed trains, sitting alongside a dedicated layout for Hornby's compact TT:120 scale, which was introduced in October 2022. The building stands beside the One:One Collection, a display of full-size heritage locomotives and rolling stock that opened at Hornby's former Margate factory in 2019 after being assembled by railway financier Jeremy Hosking; the WonderWorks runs separate One:One Collection tours. The Margate site and its brands have featured in the Yesterday channel television series Hornby: A Model World, first broadcast in 2021.
Tiny Town & Railroad
Tiny Town & Railroad is a miniature village of more than 100 hand-built structures at one-sixth scale, set on a wooded site at 6249 South Turkey Creek Road southwest of Morrison, Colorado, in the foothills off U.S. Highway 285. The buildings — homes, a church, a school, a bank, a grocery and replicas of Colorado landmarks — are small enough that visiting children and adults tower over them. Winding through the village is a 15-inch (381 mm) gauge ridable miniature railway that covers 5/8 of a mile (about 1 km) of track at a maximum grade of 3%. The attraction traces to 1915, when Denver moving-and-storage owner George Turner — a friend of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody — began building a miniature town called Turnerville to entertain his young daughter. It opened to the public around 1920 and, by its 1924 heyday, included some 125 buildings and drew roughly 20,000 visitors a year up the mountain roads from Denver. Floods in 1929, 1932 and 1969 and a fire in 1935 repeatedly damaged the site, and the 1948 rerouting of Highway 285 away from the entrance cut its passing trade. A train was added in 1939, giving the site its current name. After decades of boom and bust, the Northern Colorado Chapter of the Institute of Real Estate Management adopted Tiny Town as a civic project in 1987, and volunteers established the non-profit Tiny Town Foundation in 1989 to operate it. The World Famous Tiny Town Railway returned to operation in 1990, and the park today runs restored steam locomotives maintained by an all-volunteer roundhouse crew.
Miniature Railroad & Village at Kamin Science Center
The Miniature Railroad & Village at the Kamin Science Center (formerly the Carnegie Science Center) is one of the oldest and most detailed permanent model railroad displays in the United States. Housed on Pittsburgh's North Shore at One Allegheny Avenue, the exhibit recreates life in Western Pennsylvania between roughly 1880 and 1930 across a platform measuring 83 feet (25 m) long by 30 feet (9.1 m) wide. Five independent loops of Lionel O-gauge trains and a single Bowser trolley run continuously through the scene, threading past more than 250,000 handmade trees and over 1,500 feet (460 m) of GarGraves track. The display traces its origins to Charles Bowdish (1896–1988), a World War I veteran from Brookville, Pennsylvania, who built his first Christmas railroad in his hometown home in 1919. After a guest brought friends to see it on December 24, 1920 — the date now marked as the exhibit's birthday — nearly 600 people visited, and Bowdish kept expanding the layout across his entire second floor. In 1954 the display moved to Pittsburgh's Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, where it was renamed The Miniature Railroad & Village in 1957. When the Buhl closed in 1991 and the science center opened in its place, a purpose-built gallery allowed the new, expanded exhibit to open in fall 1992. Every model is handcrafted by staff and volunteers and replicates a real Western Pennsylvania structure. Landmarks include Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, the demolished Forbes Field, the original Heinz factory, George Westinghouse's castle, John Roebling's house and workshop, the Rachel Carson Homestead, and the Sharon Steel Mill from Farrell — the largest steel mill ever replicated in O scale, built from the plant's original blueprints.
Choo Choo Barn - Traintown U.S.A.
The Choo Choo Barn - Traintown U.S.A. is a 1,700-square-foot (158 m2) animated model railroad display in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, on Route 741 (Gap Road) in the heart of Lancaster County's "Train City." The layout runs more than 180 hand-built animated figures and vehicles alongside 17 operating trains, recreating scenes from Lancaster County and small-town America in miniature. The display grew out of one family's hobby. George Groff began it in 1945 with a $12.50 Lionel train set bought as a Christmas gift for his two-year-old son Gary, and the collection soon filled much of the family basement on Franklin Street. In 1961 George and Florence Groff moved the display to a former township maintenance building on Route 741, just west of the recently reopened Strasburg Rail Road, and the Choo Choo Barn opened to the public on Thanksgiving Day 1961 with about 600 square feet (56 m2) of scenery, six trains and six animated figures. Their son Thomas and his wife Linda took over in 1979, and the Groff family still owns and updates the layout today. Every scene pays homage to the surrounding region: an Amish barn raising, a circus and a zoo, a ski slope with lodge and ice skaters, a baseball game, and miniature replicas of local landmarks such as the Dutch Haven, The Willows restaurant, the Strasburg fire house and the Strasburg Rail Road itself. The whole room cycles from day to night, with building lights and animations shifting as the "sun" sets.
TrainTastic
TrainTastic, operated by the Mississippi Coast Model Railroad Museum, occupies a 50,000-square-foot (4,645 m2) building at 615 Pass Road in Gulfport, Mississippi, and bills itself as the largest model railroad museum in the world. The attraction grew out of a local model-railroad club: the collection dates back to 1990 and the Train Club was formally organized in 1993, expanding through a series of adjacent buildings on Pass Road before reopening in its current, greatly enlarged home in June 2023 under the TrainTastic name. Brothers Richard P. Mueller, Jr. and Glenn Mueller, Sr. — the family behind RPM Pizza, the region's Domino's master franchise — funded the expansion as a philanthropic project rooted in a childhood collection that began with a single Lionel train. Inside, more than twenty-five elaborate layouts run trains in scales from Z gauge up to G gauge, and the museum presents close to 200 years of railroad and model-railroad history, including a model train that honors POW-MIAs of Vietnam and World War II. A centerpiece Gulf Coast layout recreates local landmarks — from Keesler Air Force Base and the nearby Mississippi Aquarium to Café du Monde in New Orleans's French Quarter — using 3D-printed miniature buildings; the museum values that single display at more than one million dollars. Three of the layouts are built entirely from LEGO bricks, part of a collection of nearly two million pieces that TrainTastic promotes as the largest LEGO railroad display in the region. Beyond the layouts, visitors enter through a full-size passenger car themed to the 1950s, ride an outdoor "Swamp Train" on a serpentine loop through a tunnel, and explore a train-themed climber, a toddler play area and a S.T.E.A.M. education lab. The museum is largely volunteer-run, with a train club of roughly twenty-five members maintaining the exhibits.
Northlandz
Northlandz is a model railroad layout and museum in Flemington (Raritan Township), New Jersey, billed as the World's Largest Miniature Wonderland. It was conceived and hand-built almost single-handedly by artist and model-train enthusiast Bruce Williams Zaccagnino, who first constructed the layout in the basement of his home in nearby Three Bridges before moving it to the current Flemington site in 1991 and opening it to the public in the mid-1990s. The exhibit is best known for the sheer scale of its railroad: more than 8 miles (13 km) of track threading through a three-story building of roughly 52,000 square feet. In 1997 it was recognized by Guinness World Records for the longest small-scale model railway track; Germany's Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg later surpassed that record in 2005. Unlike most model layouts, Northlandz emphasizes vertical drama, with towering trestles and canyons up to 35 feet (11 m) deep. When Zaccagnino retired in 2018, the property nearly faced demolition before businessman Tariq Sohail bought it and, struck by the artistry, chose to preserve and renovate it. The reworked attraction reopened in October 2019 and today pairs the miniature railroad with a doll museum, a 2,000-pipe theater organ, and an outdoor ride-on train.
Grand Central Terminal Official Tour
Grand Central Terminal opened on February 2, 1913, the product of two firms working in tandem: Reed and Stem devised the overall plan and its innovative system of ramps, while Warren and Wetmore shaped the Beaux-Arts exterior. It remains the largest railway station in the world by number of platforms, with 44 platforms serving 67 tracks arranged across two underground levels. The vast Main Concourse measures roughly 275 feet (84 m) long, 120 feet (37 m) wide and 125 feet (38 m) high, crowned by a vaulted cerulean ceiling painted with more than 2,500 stars and the constellations of the zodiac, based on a design by French artist Paul Cesar Helleu. The official Grand Central Terminal tour is operated by Walks under an exclusive agreement with the terminal, and is the only guided tour the building has formally vetted. This 90-minute walking tour is led in English by a licensed local guide and limited to about 20 people, taking visitors beyond the Main Concourse into rooms and stories most of the roughly 750,000 daily commuters walk straight past. The tour traces the building from Cornelius Vanderbilt's original railroad vision through its near-demolition in the 1970s. Grand Central was ultimately saved by the 1978 United States Supreme Court decision Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, which upheld the city's landmark law 6 to 3, following a high-profile preservation campaign that included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and the Municipal Art Society.
Golden Spike National Historical Park
Golden Spike National Historical Park preserves 2,735 acres (1,107 ha) around a 15-mile (24 km) segment of the original first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, on the remote high desert at the north end of the Great Salt Lake in Box Elder County, Utah. It marks the spot where, on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad building east from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad building west from Omaha met and drove the ceremonial last spike — the "Wedding of the Rails" that linked the United States coast to coast by rail. The original Promontory line was bypassed by the Lucin Cutoff in 1904 and its rails were pulled up in 1942 for the war effort. Today about 2 miles (3.2 km) of authentically rebuilt 1869-style track run from the Last Spike Site to the Engine House. Preservation of the site was championed for decades by Bernice Gibbs Anderson, whose Golden Spike Association held its first re-enactment on May 10, 1952. Congress authorized federal ownership in 1965, and the site was redesignated from national historic site to Golden Spike National Historical Park on March 12, 2019. The park's signature draw is its pair of fully operational replica steam locomotives — the Central Pacific's Jupiter and the Union Pacific's No. 119, both 4-4-0 "American" types. Built by O'Connor Engineering Laboratories of Costa Mesa, California, from more than 700 new drawings based on 1869 photographs, the replicas were commissioned on May 10, 1979, the 110th anniversary of the ceremony.
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The WonderWorks by Hornby Hobbies
The WonderWorks by Hornby Hobbies is an indoor hobby attraction on the Westwood Industrial Estate in Margate, Kent, housed in the factory that has been home to Hornby Hobbies since 1954. It opened in late October 2023 as a reimagining of the former Hornby Visitor Centre, which had operated on the same site from July 2010. Hornby Hobbies traces its roots to 1901, when founder Frank Hornby patented the Meccano construction toy in Liverpool; the company produced its first clockwork train in 1920 and launched its first OO-gauge Hornby Dublo range in 1938. The attraction brings together the five model-making brands now owned by Hornby Hobbies: Hornby model railways, Scalextric slot racing, Airfix plastic kits, Corgi die-cast models and Pocher large-scale kits. The centrepiece Hornby World is a multi-track OO-gauge layout that runs from rural steam-era scenes through to modern high-speed trains, sitting alongside a dedicated layout for Hornby's compact TT:120 scale, which was introduced in October 2022. The building stands beside the One:One Collection, a display of full-size heritage locomotives and rolling stock that opened at Hornby's former Margate factory in 2019 after being assembled by railway financier Jeremy Hosking; the WonderWorks runs separate One:One Collection tours. The Margate site and its brands have featured in the Yesterday channel television series Hornby: A Model World, first broadcast in 2021.
Tiny Town & Railroad
Tiny Town & Railroad is a miniature village of more than 100 hand-built structures at one-sixth scale, set on a wooded site at 6249 South Turkey Creek Road southwest of Morrison, Colorado, in the foothills off U.S. Highway 285. The buildings — homes, a church, a school, a bank, a grocery and replicas of Colorado landmarks — are small enough that visiting children and adults tower over them. Winding through the village is a 15-inch (381 mm) gauge ridable miniature railway that covers 5/8 of a mile (about 1 km) of track at a maximum grade of 3%. The attraction traces to 1915, when Denver moving-and-storage owner George Turner — a friend of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody — began building a miniature town called Turnerville to entertain his young daughter. It opened to the public around 1920 and, by its 1924 heyday, included some 125 buildings and drew roughly 20,000 visitors a year up the mountain roads from Denver. Floods in 1929, 1932 and 1969 and a fire in 1935 repeatedly damaged the site, and the 1948 rerouting of Highway 285 away from the entrance cut its passing trade. A train was added in 1939, giving the site its current name. After decades of boom and bust, the Northern Colorado Chapter of the Institute of Real Estate Management adopted Tiny Town as a civic project in 1987, and volunteers established the non-profit Tiny Town Foundation in 1989 to operate it. The World Famous Tiny Town Railway returned to operation in 1990, and the park today runs restored steam locomotives maintained by an all-volunteer roundhouse crew.
Miniature Railroad & Village at Kamin Science Center
The Miniature Railroad & Village at the Kamin Science Center (formerly the Carnegie Science Center) is one of the oldest and most detailed permanent model railroad displays in the United States. Housed on Pittsburgh's North Shore at One Allegheny Avenue, the exhibit recreates life in Western Pennsylvania between roughly 1880 and 1930 across a platform measuring 83 feet (25 m) long by 30 feet (9.1 m) wide. Five independent loops of Lionel O-gauge trains and a single Bowser trolley run continuously through the scene, threading past more than 250,000 handmade trees and over 1,500 feet (460 m) of GarGraves track. The display traces its origins to Charles Bowdish (1896–1988), a World War I veteran from Brookville, Pennsylvania, who built his first Christmas railroad in his hometown home in 1919. After a guest brought friends to see it on December 24, 1920 — the date now marked as the exhibit's birthday — nearly 600 people visited, and Bowdish kept expanding the layout across his entire second floor. In 1954 the display moved to Pittsburgh's Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, where it was renamed The Miniature Railroad & Village in 1957. When the Buhl closed in 1991 and the science center opened in its place, a purpose-built gallery allowed the new, expanded exhibit to open in fall 1992. Every model is handcrafted by staff and volunteers and replicates a real Western Pennsylvania structure. Landmarks include Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, the demolished Forbes Field, the original Heinz factory, George Westinghouse's castle, John Roebling's house and workshop, the Rachel Carson Homestead, and the Sharon Steel Mill from Farrell — the largest steel mill ever replicated in O scale, built from the plant's original blueprints.
Choo Choo Barn - Traintown U.S.A.
The Choo Choo Barn - Traintown U.S.A. is a 1,700-square-foot (158 m2) animated model railroad display in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, on Route 741 (Gap Road) in the heart of Lancaster County's "Train City." The layout runs more than 180 hand-built animated figures and vehicles alongside 17 operating trains, recreating scenes from Lancaster County and small-town America in miniature. The display grew out of one family's hobby. George Groff began it in 1945 with a $12.50 Lionel train set bought as a Christmas gift for his two-year-old son Gary, and the collection soon filled much of the family basement on Franklin Street. In 1961 George and Florence Groff moved the display to a former township maintenance building on Route 741, just west of the recently reopened Strasburg Rail Road, and the Choo Choo Barn opened to the public on Thanksgiving Day 1961 with about 600 square feet (56 m2) of scenery, six trains and six animated figures. Their son Thomas and his wife Linda took over in 1979, and the Groff family still owns and updates the layout today. Every scene pays homage to the surrounding region: an Amish barn raising, a circus and a zoo, a ski slope with lodge and ice skaters, a baseball game, and miniature replicas of local landmarks such as the Dutch Haven, The Willows restaurant, the Strasburg fire house and the Strasburg Rail Road itself. The whole room cycles from day to night, with building lights and animations shifting as the "sun" sets.
TrainTastic
TrainTastic, operated by the Mississippi Coast Model Railroad Museum, occupies a 50,000-square-foot (4,645 m2) building at 615 Pass Road in Gulfport, Mississippi, and bills itself as the largest model railroad museum in the world. The attraction grew out of a local model-railroad club: the collection dates back to 1990 and the Train Club was formally organized in 1993, expanding through a series of adjacent buildings on Pass Road before reopening in its current, greatly enlarged home in June 2023 under the TrainTastic name. Brothers Richard P. Mueller, Jr. and Glenn Mueller, Sr. — the family behind RPM Pizza, the region's Domino's master franchise — funded the expansion as a philanthropic project rooted in a childhood collection that began with a single Lionel train. Inside, more than twenty-five elaborate layouts run trains in scales from Z gauge up to G gauge, and the museum presents close to 200 years of railroad and model-railroad history, including a model train that honors POW-MIAs of Vietnam and World War II. A centerpiece Gulf Coast layout recreates local landmarks — from Keesler Air Force Base and the nearby Mississippi Aquarium to Café du Monde in New Orleans's French Quarter — using 3D-printed miniature buildings; the museum values that single display at more than one million dollars. Three of the layouts are built entirely from LEGO bricks, part of a collection of nearly two million pieces that TrainTastic promotes as the largest LEGO railroad display in the region. Beyond the layouts, visitors enter through a full-size passenger car themed to the 1950s, ride an outdoor "Swamp Train" on a serpentine loop through a tunnel, and explore a train-themed climber, a toddler play area and a S.T.E.A.M. education lab. The museum is largely volunteer-run, with a train club of roughly twenty-five members maintaining the exhibits.
Northlandz
Northlandz is a model railroad layout and museum in Flemington (Raritan Township), New Jersey, billed as the World's Largest Miniature Wonderland. It was conceived and hand-built almost single-handedly by artist and model-train enthusiast Bruce Williams Zaccagnino, who first constructed the layout in the basement of his home in nearby Three Bridges before moving it to the current Flemington site in 1991 and opening it to the public in the mid-1990s. The exhibit is best known for the sheer scale of its railroad: more than 8 miles (13 km) of track threading through a three-story building of roughly 52,000 square feet. In 1997 it was recognized by Guinness World Records for the longest small-scale model railway track; Germany's Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg later surpassed that record in 2005. Unlike most model layouts, Northlandz emphasizes vertical drama, with towering trestles and canyons up to 35 feet (11 m) deep. When Zaccagnino retired in 2018, the property nearly faced demolition before businessman Tariq Sohail bought it and, struck by the artistry, chose to preserve and renovate it. The reworked attraction reopened in October 2019 and today pairs the miniature railroad with a doll museum, a 2,000-pipe theater organ, and an outdoor ride-on train.
Grand Central Terminal Official Tour
Grand Central Terminal opened on February 2, 1913, the product of two firms working in tandem: Reed and Stem devised the overall plan and its innovative system of ramps, while Warren and Wetmore shaped the Beaux-Arts exterior. It remains the largest railway station in the world by number of platforms, with 44 platforms serving 67 tracks arranged across two underground levels. The vast Main Concourse measures roughly 275 feet (84 m) long, 120 feet (37 m) wide and 125 feet (38 m) high, crowned by a vaulted cerulean ceiling painted with more than 2,500 stars and the constellations of the zodiac, based on a design by French artist Paul Cesar Helleu. The official Grand Central Terminal tour is operated by Walks under an exclusive agreement with the terminal, and is the only guided tour the building has formally vetted. This 90-minute walking tour is led in English by a licensed local guide and limited to about 20 people, taking visitors beyond the Main Concourse into rooms and stories most of the roughly 750,000 daily commuters walk straight past. The tour traces the building from Cornelius Vanderbilt's original railroad vision through its near-demolition in the 1970s. Grand Central was ultimately saved by the 1978 United States Supreme Court decision Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, which upheld the city's landmark law 6 to 3, following a high-profile preservation campaign that included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and the Municipal Art Society.
Golden Spike National Historical Park
Golden Spike National Historical Park preserves 2,735 acres (1,107 ha) around a 15-mile (24 km) segment of the original first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, on the remote high desert at the north end of the Great Salt Lake in Box Elder County, Utah. It marks the spot where, on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad building east from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad building west from Omaha met and drove the ceremonial last spike — the "Wedding of the Rails" that linked the United States coast to coast by rail. The original Promontory line was bypassed by the Lucin Cutoff in 1904 and its rails were pulled up in 1942 for the war effort. Today about 2 miles (3.2 km) of authentically rebuilt 1869-style track run from the Last Spike Site to the Engine House. Preservation of the site was championed for decades by Bernice Gibbs Anderson, whose Golden Spike Association held its first re-enactment on May 10, 1952. Congress authorized federal ownership in 1965, and the site was redesignated from national historic site to Golden Spike National Historical Park on March 12, 2019. The park's signature draw is its pair of fully operational replica steam locomotives — the Central Pacific's Jupiter and the Union Pacific's No. 119, both 4-4-0 "American" types. Built by O'Connor Engineering Laboratories of Costa Mesa, California, from more than 700 new drawings based on 1869 photographs, the replicas were commissioned on May 10, 1979, the 110th anniversary of the ceremony.