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.

Personal photography and video are welcome throughout the layout - staff encourage visitors to take all the pictures they like. Because it is an open, walk-around display rather than a glass-cased exhibit, you can shoot the scenes directly. The animated fire scene and the day-to-night lighting transition are the standout shots; visiting on a quieter weekday (Tuesday to Thursday) makes it easier to photograph the layout without crowds in the frame.

For model-railroad enthusiasts, the appeal is in the engineering. Most of the trains run on O gauge track, with some HO and a single N gauge train, using Lionel, Mike's Train House (MTH) and K-Line equipment on Gargraves track. The 17 operating trains share the layout with animations built the way a piston works - a motor turns an arm that pushes and pulls a rod - as well as more complex mechanisms using chain drives, gears, micro switches, relays and timers.

The signature set piece is the fire scene, completely redesigned and upgraded in 2000. A house appears to catch fire and a fire engine races in to douse it with real squirting water, driven by eight motors, five timer boards and a web of limit switches, gears and linkages. Another crowd favorite is the flag that "flies" from a telescoping brass flagpole fed by a quarter-horsepower air compressor - the largest motor on the display.

The Choo Choo Barn is a genuine piece of folk engineering built by one family over more than 70 years, with master modeler Tom Groff designing new animations, scale buildings and local scenes each season. You don't have to be a railfan to appreciate it, but if you are, it rewards a close, slow look.

Plan on roughly an hour. There is so much packed into the layout that most visitors walk around it at least twice and still miss hidden details. The room dims and brightens on a day-to-night cycle, so animations and lit windows reveal themselves as the lighting changes.

The attraction sits about three-quarters of a mile from Strasburg's town square. Tuesday through Thursday are the least crowded days; weekends and holidays draw the largest family crowds. After the display, the same complex - the Shops of Traintown - houses specialty retail shops and Bespoke Brewing, plus the Choo Choo Barn's own gift shop and model-railroad store (products are also sold online at etrainshop.com).

The Choo Choo Barn is a walk-around display, not a train ride, and it appeals to all ages rather than only train fans.