Christmas Trains

Well, I am playing blog catch up again! So here's the first one... Back at the beginning of December we heard about the Christmas Train displays that you can visit throughout the East Valley. There are two near our house and so I loaded up the kids one evening when Robby was working late and took them. Basically there are several model train enthusiasts who have huge train sets set up permantly in their backyards and they decorate them for the holidays and open up their backyard for people to visit. The first one we went to was really neat, it had about 4 different tracks that spanned all along the fence of the backyard. There were buildings and little plastic people on the side and in the train. Very intricate! I thought it was quite large until we went to the second house. This guy owns a very good restaurant that is across the street from our neighborhood (Tia Rosa's) and he has a very large property. He has turned half of his very large backyard into a permanent train track! Take a look...

I wish it wasn't dark because you would be able to see better how incredibly large this track is. In fact, it is the 3rd largest model train track in the US. The track is still a work in progress, and from what we heard this guy is planning on transforming the other half of his backyard into train track too! I guess he is aiming to build the largest model train track in the US!

Now if your jaw hasn't dropped at seeing the track, this picture of his storage building for his model trains should make your jaw drop now. And this picture doesn't even show half of it! Little Robby said to me while we were there, "This is when a hobby become an obsession!"

The guy who owns it all is the white haired man seen in the right side of the this picture. This shows the 9 tracks that all lead out to the massive outdoor track. While we were there he had several trains running and about four guys monitoring everything to make sure there were no crashes. It boggled my mind!