Model trains appeal to kids, grown-ups at Healdsburg Museum

Charlotte Sandoval of Santa Rosa is 3 years old, but already a bit of a train connoisseur.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon, she was taking in the “Model Trains Spectacular!” exhibit at the Healdsburg Museum in the former Carnegie Library completed in 1910 when automobiles were just becoming America's passion.

But an affinity for steel wheels and rails abides in both young and old.

“She loves trains,” said Paula Sandoval, 45, speaking for her preschooler.

Charlotte has ridden on the TrainTown Railroad in Sonoma and later this week will board the Napa Valley Wine Train's seasonal Santa Train, which travels to the North Pole with hot chocolate and fresh-based cookies served en route.

Riding the SMART commuter train is on the girl's to-do list, her mother said.

Charlotte loves trains, cars, dinosaurs and construction equipment, but she's also fond of “princesses and fairies,” her mom said.

Charlotte was too distracted to talk, her attention on a Thomas the Tank Engine puzzle and wooden Brio train set in the Kids Play Area along one wall of the museum. But her love of trains runs in the family.

“I've always liked trains,” said her father, Carlos Miguel Sandoval, 47, who will set up the family's holiday season six-car O scale Lionel train set at home and grew up playing with HO scale trains.

Dana Grigg, 47, of Healdsburg, held up his daughter Remy, 18 months, to take in the exhibition's centerpiece, an eight-car O scale train pulled by twin blue-and-yellow diesel locomotives traversing a long oval track around a model village.

The model is a replica of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad's Redwood Empire Route that went through Healdsburg. One of the Lionel train cars is a silver tanker bearing the name L. Foppiano Wine Co.

Grigg grew up playing with Lionel trains he inherited from his father and will eventually have Remy taking the controls herself.

“They were just toys when they came out,” he said. “Now they're a historical record of the trains that changed the country.”

Railroads indeed transformed California, which became a state in 1850 but was for nearly two decades an isolated outpost on the Pacific coast.

Many of the early Forty-Niners of the gold rush era endured a voyage around the tip of South America that could take up to eight months, and the grim fate of the Donner Party in 1846 illustrated the risks of an overland trip.

But when the famous golden spike was driven in May 1869, creating the first transcontinental railroad, the journey from Omaha, Nebraska, to the coast took a matter of days, and the Golden State's boom truly ignited.

As a tribute to that history, the exhibit includes a replica of the first full-size steam locomotive built in California at the Union Iron Works in San Francisco that set a speed record of 67 mph in its inaugural run in 1865.

The model was built by Shirley Truitt, a Healdsburg native born in 1890 who became a heavy equipment construction engineer at the Union Iron Works and, in retirement, fashioned the model at one-sixteenth scale from the original train plans.

The company's owner, Peter Donohue, brought rail service to Healdsburg in 1871.

The same glass case holds an 11-car LGB Wilson Bros. Circus Train and the bright yellow and red locomotives of a Lego train.

A photo on the wall depicts the Healdsburg Railroad Depot, circa 1915, with a horse-drawn wagon and early automobiles parked near a train at the station.

The Healdsburg Museum is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, and the model trains exhibit runs through Jan. 7. Admission is free.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.