The line, which uses four steam locomotives and wooden coaches, cuts across fertile Lancaster County fields. The first of them is signaled by clouds of black coal smoke and the wail of steam whistles at grade crossings on the 4.5‐mile Strasburg Rail Road. Five miles west on Route 30 at the town of Gap, I follow Route 741 west toward Strasburg, the start of several miles of rail attractions. This is Pennsylvania Dutch country, and somber Amish in horsedrawn buggies travel the rural roads. Going east one exit on Interstate 78 to State Route 61 South, I pass through Reading (immortalized in Monopoly games with “Take a Ride on the Reading”) and continue south about 27 miles to Route 30. The Shartlesville Hotel also serves huge breakfasts from 8 A.M. Offered at long informal elbowto‐elbow tables are heaped platters of chicken, potatoes, chicken croquettes, ham, sausage, noodles, mustard beans, rhubarb sauce, shoo‐fly pie and lemon sponge. The 200‐year‐old Shartlesville Hotel, which charges $4.95 for dinner, and the five‐generations‐in‐onefamily Haag's Hotel ($5) serve daily from 11 A.M. (Lionel trains, incidentally, are manufactured today by the Fundimensions Division of General Mills.)Ī mile east on the local Shartlesville road, two atmospheric restaurants offer all‐you‐can‐eat Pennsylvania Dutch meals. Even as an adult standing well above the child‐high restraining rail circling the layout, I wish for binoculars to see the farthest tiny details. Street lamps twinkle as night falls over villages linked by rushing locomotives, their headlights casting great mysterious shadows. More than 200 Lionel locomotives and cars crowd sidings and mainlines. A trolley tootles past an old dance hall, figures moving inside. A real river winds under wooden railroad trestles and plummets in a waterfall over the heads of startled spectators. Plaster and dried‐moss mountain ranges stretch into the dim vastness of the 165foot building. Its toy locomotives still sending up puffs of smoke after 38 years, Roadside America is as magical today as when I first stepped through its curtained entrance as a grade‐schooler. Photographs of Roadside America in toy train magazines of, the 1940's and 1950's often sent fathers and sons sawing and hammering in spare rooms. There, open daily in a pink falsefront building shaped like an airplane hangar, is Roadside America, the inspiration for many model railroad layouts. This odyssey in innocence begins 125 miles southwest of New York on Interstate 78 in the whistle‐stop village of Shartlesville, 35 miles west of Allentown. Among them are silver and red Santa Fe streamliners, milk cars with men delivering milk cans and lantern‐waving railroad crossing gatemen. Restaurants serve meals in salvaged railroad diner cars complete with sound effects and rocking motion while motels offer accommodations in old cabooses with television sets built into their potbelly stoves.Įven Joshua Lionel Cowen, who created Lionel electric‐trains In 1900 as “the perfect instrument of father‐son fellowship” and presumably had all the locomotives he wanted to play with, knight be impressed with the quantities of his little toy preserved throughout Pennsylvania. Restored steam engines on scenic railroads whistle past Amish farmers in black, plowing their fields behind teams of mules. Toy train museums display the scarred miniature locomotives that once ran between sofa and club chair while real railroad museums preserve the now silent behemoths that once chuffed between Chicago and Pittsburgh. The Keystone State offers enough toy and real train attraclions within a weekend's drive of New York to compensate for many a disappointing Christmas morning. For boys who never found the exact electric train they wanted under the Christmas tree, and for girls who never Sound any train at all, there is still Pennsylvania.
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