







The head of Roads and Rails encouraged me to write up the story of our museum, and I am serializing the first draft here on the blog. Enjoy.
1. Genesis of an Idea
The idea first began in the numerous trips taken by the burroughs family in the 1970s and 80s throughout the eastern seaboard states, where our station wagon was often found parked at a roadside museum involving history, trains or cars. Roadside America was one in particular that made an impression, Choo-Choo Barn was another. A home layout, usually modest in cost and effort due to the time it took to build a small software business, was always part of our home life. My father had been model railroading since his youth in the 1950s, and had experience with Lionel O-Gauge, TT (“Table-Top”), HO and N scales in the decades since.
My father also had a classic car or two in the garage at any given time in the 1970s and early 80s, preferably Kaiser-Frazer and Studebaker models. I accompanied him to junkyards in woody, out of the way places to find needed parts among the poison ivy and copperheads of Appalachia. The cars later had to go to help pay for school for four children, but I the numerous books about classic cars remained in our family library, and I’m sure the idea of re-acquiring his beloved cars was never far from his mind.
Anyone old enough to remember the HO scale boom of the 1970s can recall the ever-present smell of ozone and the occasional smoke that seemed an inevitable part of the model railroading experience. The coming of home computing seemed to draw off many frustrated model railroaders at the end of the 1970s, with word of money to be made in software by tinkerers in garages and basements. In our home we had both, as my father had a career in computer programming beginning with the ‘big steel’ of the mainframe era thru the minicomputer revolution and on thru PCs and the Internet. He often programmed in front of the TV in the late 1970s with a monochrome monitor and a big umbilical leading back to the Data General minicomputer in his home office. And the trains were always a part of our home life. It was always a modest layout with the more inexpensive HO engines and cars, as other family priorities, like food and shelter, always had a greater a place in our home budget. Old Model Railroaders like to say that you can sleep under your layout, but you certainly can’t eat it!
It was always an HO scale layout until the mid-1990s. The revival in O scale led by Mike’s Train House, a manufacturer based in Columbia, MD, was ongoing and it occurred to the now-grown children in our family to give Dad a real Christmas present: a full set of RailKing from MTH.
“What the hell am I going to do with this?”, said my father to himself; generously, he kept this sentiment to himself and smiled broadly. Soon, however, he found the sound effects and reliability of these new O-Scale giants to be a real treat, and began expanding the layout rapidly.
The limitations placed on the size of my father’s 3-rail ambitions were loosened considerably by the growing success of his company, Visual One Systems, and my parents’ move to a larger, more modern home in Frederick, Maryland from Bethesda. Many of the ideas that viewers see today first began on this basement layout. This layout used older building methods, with a stout wood table topped with mountains made of metal screen covered with plaster. It was about 8 x 20 feet and quite a few of the ceramic buildings made it onto our present display.
The sale of Visual One Systems to Agilysys in 2007 and Dave Sr.’s subsequent retirement set in motion the plan for a permanent, public venue for his miniature world, complemented by a collection of cars from America’s automotive heyday.
2. First Movements
A year before retiring my father had acquired a handsome black and gold ‘Packabaker’: Studebaker’s high-end Packard sedan. Studebaker merged with Packard in the mid 50s and decided to use the Packard name for high end sedans. Packard was the cash-strong partner in the deal. The march of the Big Three flattened the new Studebaker anyway, which left the car business in 1965. This was the first 1950s car my dad had owned since selling his Kaiser Manhattan in the early 1980s. A new collection was being assembled, and these cars would need a home.
Dave Sr. knew he would be starting another business after Visual One, and initially this was to be another software business, as he enjoys programming. However the idea of a public museum was more attractive in the end. He decided to move to another house and move the trains to building of their own. Opening that building to a paying public became a more attractive proposition every time the idea was discussed.
3. Hiring the first builders
My brother John was working in Los Angeles, building sets and special effects for the film and television industry. His skills would be a significant asset for the museum, and soon my father made the offer sweet enough to entice him back to the East Coast.
John taught the rest of us how to carve foam in a professional manner (using curry combs, meant for grooming horses) and how to safely paint the final form to produce a natural effect.
He also brought plastic casting skills to bear on the problems of manufacturing custom parts for our display.
Matthew was in Philadelphia, having completed a degree in Film at Temple. When he returned to the area with his fiance, he brought the artistic sense and organizational skills he acquired working on film projects to the creation of our layout and the business of showing it to the public.
The only non-Burroughs was Regis Shaw, who was a contractor and handyman my father had employed in his previous business. He also did a good bathroom remodel for me so I could move north to Frederick without taking a bath (pun intended) on the sale of my Gaithersburg house.
He brought carpentry and general building skills, and later proved useful in all the flooring our permanent location needed.
I stayed with Agilysys for a year and a half before leaving to start my own consulting firm as an independent programmer and systems analyst. After a year of slow business heading into an economic recession, I was invited to join the effort and bring my project management background and love of wiring to our new family business.
Of course my Dad was there at every opportunity, and my mother began to complain that she saw more of him during his career than during his retirement. He managed to handle this issue with the purchase of a small winter bungalow in Florida and started spending his winters there with my mother. I believe the project has taken years off his age, and that some medical researcher should do a study on the calisthenic benefits of model railroading, given all the crawling, climbing and reaching we do in the course of construction and operation of this layout. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly before leaving the software business, and still built a great number of intricate buildings, as well as overseeing the entire project from conception to public operation.
4. Acquiring Cars, Building the first layout
In the warehouse on Highland Avenue, we began assembling the first layout in the presence of our growing collection of 1950s automotive beauty. The initial layout was only 24 feet square, with only a single set of wires going to a lone transformer. What a contrast with the intricate weave of voltages and power sources that makes up our miniature world today! If we could turn over the layout and show the work that has gone into this tapestry of copper I think our visitors would have, if possible, and even greater appreciation of the effort that went into the display.
Most of our time was spent making buildings and bridges for our beginning layout and the larger one we knew was coming. My baptism of fire as a model builder was the refinery, a kit produced by Plastruct that nobody wanted to touch. This model was created by an engineer who designed real refineries, and unlike the kits I was used to assembling, all that was provided was the raw materials and a blueprint! I hope to this day that nobody sees the million and one mistakes I made building it.
I must have done well enough on the refinery because I was then given the task of copying a trestle my father saw online and wanted for our layout. All I had to work off of was the pictures he provided. I quickly built a jig for the supports and worked out a plan for getting the same effect from economically acquired materials. Each support is made of poplar with hardwood cross supports, all cut and glued by hand. The roadbed the track lays on is made up of HO scale bridges turned upside down. It is the first raised trestle encountered by visitors and crosses over the line that leads to our ‘Amtrak’ station.
Our warehouse workshop had heating but no air-conditioning, so we operated a big fan to keep cool through the summer. We also started going home around 3pm, drenched in sweat, setting a dangerous precedent in regard to our work ethic. It was not until we moved to East St. that we began again, grudgingly, to work full days. It would take 5 years of work before we opened our doors on 4th of July weekend, 2011.