Monday, March 27, 2006

Northlandz Model Trains

I've been spending the weekend in NJ with my sister. We stopped off at
Northlandz on a trip to New Hope. It was pretty fun, though little kids or model railroad buffs will enjoy it more. Their photos don't quite convey the dust on the models (I thought one section with the dust covered matchbox-sized cars looked like The Day After) or the dearth of actual moving trains. There were several large displays and you wander around through them seeing them from different angles. At some points we saw 3 trains moving at once, but there were a lot of point where we saw no trains at all.

The layouts don't model real sites at all, they are a little more whimsical with a Disney-like castle and a dark non-moving amusement park with one of the few captions of the display "Amusement park during a power failure." Most of the places reminded me of the movie Popeye, with structures built improbably vertical along cliff faces. Nevertheless, it wasn't a bad way to kill an hour. Little kids seemed to like it more, but would have really enjoyed it if there were more moving trains.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We took the kids there a couple of years ago. They were too young to make it through the whole thing on their own, so we had to carry them through half of the way. But they enjoyed it a lot. We bought their video as well, but it was not as good a the "I Love Toy Trains" video series.
The Travel Channel had a show that they called millionairs and their toys, and Northlandz owner was one of the people, they showed. I beleive he made his money in the computer/software business.

Anonymous said...

It's fun to see if you like that sort of thing at all, but much more on quantity than quality.