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How Did Our Main Street Holiday Trains Start?

December 30, 2014

Christmas Displays at EnterTRAINment

Did you visit our Main Street Holiday Trains this season?

The main G Scale Train Display is hand built by our volunteers from scratch every year. Most of them were the ones building Duke Energy’s free holiday train display and that is how EnterTRAINment’s display came about! A lot of the trains and scenery you see running on the display are actually from their personal collections! Many of them are from the Cincinnati Garden Railway Society. Interested in being a member?

The HO layout in the Expo Center was built last year by a former employee using a Christmas village that belongs to our owner!

Another layout featured is an interactive O scale layout. This was given to us from the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Our owner went to them hoping to get ideas on how to make our layout more interactive and came back with their layout! A few alterations were make to the display and now has a new home in out Expo Center year round.

All of our other photo spots in the Main Street Holiday display were given to us by Kings Island when they ended Winter Fest. If you haven’t come out to see us this holiday, all of our Christmas attractions are up until January 4th! Check out all out season events on our calendar.

Christmas on Main Street

Did you know?

Our highest mountain on display is over 16 feet tall.

Our Train Journey uses 1,968 gallons of scenic colored dirt and grasses costing over $26,000

Our mountains are carved out of 58,000 square feet of spray foam!

We have over 2 miles of G track with 1 mile hidden inside mountains.

There are over 100 scratch built bridges and trestles modeled after real-life structures.

Over 130 talented craftsmen volunteered over 200,000 man-hours to create our display.

EnterTRAINment Junction was conceived in 2003, train construction began in June of 2007 and opened for business in August of 2008.

The entire display is built to be historically accurate showing railroads in 3 distinct time periods.

Opening for business in August 2008, we’ve continuously added more to layouts each month.

Over 1,800 gallons of water is used with 3 storage tanks for waterfalls and rivers.

The control panels that operate each track have over 20,000 solder joints with 8,000 lines of programming to operate multiple trains on the same track.

The walkway through our exhibit is 850 feet long.

Our train display is 25,000 sq. ft. – about ½ of a football field.

Each tunnel leads you into a new time period through your journey.

Our scale is ½” = 1 ft. So, a 6 ft person in life is modeled as a 3” person in our display.

We have hidden 10 dinosaurs in our display – can you find them all?

All of our volunteers leave a personal touch on the items they work on – you can even see a photo of some in their buildings!

The seats in our museum are from Dayton train station from 1900.

We’ve had visitors from all 50 states and 37 countries!

We recently added a Bates Motel to our display – have you spotted it yet?

The tilt in our tilt room is 25 degrees.

During construction, we had to dig into the ground to build the Ames Room.

When you take a picture with flash on a camera of the steamboat, you’ll hear thunder after like it was a flash of lightning.

During your journey, we simulate night and day with 15 minutes of daytime followed by 5 minutes of night.

The switchback line has 2 trains. The one going up the hill has no logs and the train going downhill are fully loaded with logs.

The Coney Island amusement park display is a replica of Cincinnati’s Coney Island as it looked in 1965 – complete with working rides.