Sonoma TrainTown Railroad

Story

The Sonoma TrainTown Railroad is a tourist railroad and small amusement park in Sonoma, California. Its logo is based on the logo for the New York Central Railroad. Its main feature is a gauge miniature railway, which closely corresponds to a 1:4 scale model of a railroad.HistoryTrainTown was built by Stanley Frank, a printer from Oakland, California, who in 1958 "began bringing his dream railroad to life, building everything himself, from the houses and landscaping to the line's two steam locomotives and one electric engine." The railroad opened to the public in 1968. Frank died in 1977, and his relatives have continued the business, adding more locomotives, landscaping and amusement park rides.DescriptionsCalled "an endearing and surprising modern tribute to trains", TrainTown is "an obsessively accurate model railroad". It has been described as "the most well-developed miniature railroad" in the Americas. It operates in "a wooded 10-acre park on a 20-minute ride past waterfalls and beautifully detailed houses, over a trestle and through several tunnels, all precisely one-quarter the size of the real thing." It carries up to 90 passengers on each ride, and includes four miles of track.TrainTown features an operating replica of a New York Central Hudson locomotive, but numbered 5212, which no New York Central steam locomotive was ever numbered. This is considered by some to be the "most beautiful steam locomotive of the 1930s".