Kids certainly have a blast at the Festival of Trains, and the annual event is now one of the area’s biggest draws for cooped-up families looking to get out and do something fun over the holiday break.

But organizers insist that some of the most memorable interactions are with adults who wander around the chugging, whistling, flashing and constantly moving landscape, either with their kids or perhaps by themselves. Keep your eyes peeled, they say, and you’ll notice just as much joy in those older eyes.

“I had one person last year ask me if anyone could push the buttons, and I told him sure, it’s like that old song – kids from one to 92,” organizer Roy Aydelotte tells The Ticker. “He looked at me and said ‘Well, I’m 94.’ And I said, ‘We’ll make an exception for you – go ahead.’”

The festival includes miniature trains running on hundreds of feet of track, along with accompanying scenery and buildings (many of which light up or move with the push of several buttons along the track). Various other train-related attractions fill out the space. It serves as a fundraiser for the Northern Michigan Railroad Club – which organizes it – along with the Great Lakes Children’s Museum and Creekside Community Church, which now hosts it.

The festival dates to 1991, when “founding fathers” Dave Walker, Rick Antosh and former DDA head, city commissioner and all-around civic leader Bryan Crough set up a bunch of trains at the City Opera House to raise money for extensive renovations there.

While the event became a substantial visitor attraction, it somewhat ironically lost its home in 2002 when those renovations began. The railroad club launched in 2003 in part to carry on this tradition, and hosted the festival for several years at the Carnegie Library on Sixth Street (now home to the Crooked Tree Arts Center). The need for even more space in 2021 landed the beloved event at its current location.

The setup includes a mixture of items owned collectively by the club and personally by its members, who gather to set it all up and then are there to run it for the duration of the two-week event. Operating the spread includes a good amount of defensive work to protect against otherwise well-intentioned visitors, who get to “touching and reaching and bumping” after not noticing (or ignoring) the many “please do not touch” signs on the tables.

“There’s supposed to be one person in charge of each table, and then we have other helpers (floating around) to fend off folks who want to touch things,” organizer and club member Paul DeLange tells The Ticker. “We’ve found out over the years that some folks can’t read – especially the little ones.”

Sometimes it’s more than hands.

“We had a case five or six years ago where a lady came in with a big bag or a purse of some sort, probably over 20 pounds; she wasn’t watching and she set it right down in this big area where the track was,” says Aydelotte, who’s been with the club for more than 15 years. “Well, I managed to get two of the three trains stopped in time, but the third one ran right into it.”

Not to worry. Festival organizers have a designated outlet for those who simply have to get their hands on something.

“We set up a bunch of wooden trains over there that the kids can play with,” DeLange says. “They’ll spend hours over there playing with those things, and then they’re kicking and screaming on the way out when the parents say they can’t stay any longer.”

In many ways, the miniature train hobby is a relic of days gone by, supplanted by more modern entertainment. The railroad club members hope the Festival of Trains sparks interest from the next generation. It has a few times before, with at least one young club member getting his first exposure at the festival.

“There’s the occasional kid that you know is a potential train person. He has his mouth hanging open looking at a train, and he’s running around either side watching it come by. Maybe you’ll see them go around the layout three or four times,” Aydelotte says. “The parent probably tells them to sit down a minute because they’re getting dizzy.”

Like other hobbies, Aydelotte says, there are plenty of “points of entry.”

“What you see here is the culmination of all the woodworking, putting the modules and the toppers together. And it’s understanding all of the electrical stuff to support the various timers and operations, laying down the track, doing the scenery work,” he says. “There’s an awful lot of areas people can get into.”

The festival runs through New Year's Eve. Click here for days and hours. 

Photo: Michele Gentry and her daughter Sawyer. Inset, Roy Aydelotte, Jim Sullivan and Paul DeLange