Like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence, the Fairplex Garden Railroad is a study in contradictions.
The beloved LA County Fair attraction is believed to be the oldest and largest such railway in the world outside a private collection, operating on nearly two miles of track.
Yet this railroad is made up of scale-model trains running through miniature settings, through which its human operators stride like gods.
And this year, the diminutive railway hits an oversized number: 100.
2024 is billed as the 100th anniversary of the Garden Railroad, counting from its 1924 debut.
Of course that means 2024 is its 101st year, not its 100th, but let’s not be party poopers. It’s a county fair for the masses, not a math class.
The Garden Railroad is a perennial favorite among fairgoers, and why shouldn’t it be?
“It’s one of those traditional exhibits people will come to see and bring their kids and now their grandkids. Everybody loves trains,” says Renee Hernandez, a spokesperson for the fair, which runs through May 27 at the Pomona fairgrounds.
Adds Hernandez: “We’re glad they’re celebrating their 100th and we’re glad it’s still here.”
So am I. I’ve marveled at the exhibit since my first fair in 1998, make a point of walking by every year and some years have written about it.
With its centennial, the tiny trains loomed large in my mind. So I dropped by the display last week, a few days before the fair opened. Longtime volunteer John Collins was there, making small improvements to a mountain scene. He found Rick Bremer, the exhibit’s coordinator, for me.
Bremer opened with a point of clarification. “I haven’t been here for 100 years,” he allowed. “Just 24.”
But Bremer has educated himself about the 76 years — or is that 77? — that he missed. He put together an article on the exhibit for Garden Railroading News.
Wrote Bremer: “Trained volunteers operate up to 30 trains, which travel over 10,000 feet of G-scale track, passing over 30 bridges and over streams and lakes.” During fairtime, he continued, the display features 250 buildings and 1,000 scale figures.
Bremer also compiled a decade-by-decade history for banners on display around the layout’s perimeter.
Some of the history came courtesy of John Huie, who ran the display for a quarter-century and is said to have an enormous model train layout of his own.
“John has some amazing photographs he shared with us, including a picture we believe was taken in 1924,” Bremer told me. “That was the first year of the Garden Railroad and the third year of the fair.”
The photo shows a diorama constructed by the Pomona Boys Model Yacht Club whose centerpiece was a temporary pond with model ships and boats. A train ran around the perimeter. The display was housed inside a tent.
Remarkably, the handmade model of a Pacific Electric Red Car trolley from that 1924 fair has survived.
Bremer hoisted it for me. It’s more than two feet long, heavy, accurate inside and out. Huie loaned the model for the centennial, where it’s inside a display case with other early pieces.
To mark the centennial, an 8-foot display shaped like a birthday cake has a different scale of train circling track on each of seven layers, another way of paying tribute to the exhibit’s decades of change and progress.
In 1935, the expanding exhibit moved outdoors to become the Garden Railroad we know today.
In the first decades, the guiding light was Herman Howard, a Pomona High shop teacher and model train buff.
Howard made the engines and cars by hand and with a fanatical attention to detail. One passenger car, Huie told me in 2006, had a pressurized tank for a shower that actually worked.
Howard sold the display in 1958 to Herman and Lois Templin, who kept it going another decade until a freak accident in 1968. Days before the fair’s opening, Herman Templin was electrocuted while working on the exhibit and died.
Huie, Templin’s assistant, kept the exhibit going. The fair purchased the layout in 1971 and contracted with Huie, who continually expanded and improved the exhibit.
In 1996, new volunteers stepped in and the fair’s oversight became more formal, with a budget and an employee to oversee the 60 volunteers.
Bremer, its coordinator since 2012, began volunteering in 2000 after seeing the exhibit.
“I came out once and was hooked,” said Bremer, who’d had a model train as a boy in Ohio.
The 100-by-300-foot layout, in place since 1951, is bigger than two doubles tennis courts. Trains travel through scenes reflecting California railroad history with such locales as the Old West, the desert, a seaside, a steel mill, an oil refinery and modern Pomona.
Some real-life buildings are replicated at small scale, including Roy’s Cafe in Amboy and such downtown Pomona icons as the Mayfair Hotel and the Fox Theater. The oldest structure in the layout is a switching station from the 1930s, Bremer said.
Two new scenes are sponsored by the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center. One is a detailed, roofless model of the museum, with miniature displays on its walls.
A second scene depicts a mountain trod by dinosaur figures, evoking the museum’s sculpture of a mammoth, familiar to anyone who travels the 60 Freeway.
Related Articles
Life in their 60s is ‘liberating’ and fulfilling, readers say
Home canning contest preserves kitchen tradition at LA County Fair
If you didn’t care about the Super Bowl, it was time for an end run
Except this mountain is rigged with a steam effect to mimic a volcano, as if these were real dinosaurs.
“I’m sure this is going to be pretty popular with the kids,” Bremer says.
As to what the tiny saurians, who died out 65 million years ago, would make of a modern train rumbling past, well, that’s getting into Ray Bradbury territory. As long as the giant lizards don’t try to leap aboard like hobos, the anniversary should work out fine.
brIEfly
At the VIP opening party last Friday, Walter Marquez, Fairplex’s CEO, said the LA County Fair can draw up to 110,000 customers per day during its run. He’d read recently that Disneyland averages 51,000 visitors per day. Claiming to be unimpressed, Marquez joked: “If we look around and see only 50,000 people, we say, ‘Man, it’s really dead here.’”
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, days when it’s really live here. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.