[Music] We have waterfalls. We have Bridges. We have tunnels with landscaping on top which
is flowers and trees. Those all have to be held up structurally. It was all engineered
by my mother. At the time she was the only woman involved in the commercial capacity in
model trains. I have a habit of not listening to people or doing things my way. She stopped her
business for two and a half years to build him the most amazing model train museum in
private hands in America. Everybody thought I was crazy, but they were in for big surprise. [Music]
This is the famous outdoor garden railroad which is one of the largest
and in my opinions best in the United States on a private property. There are over
7000 linear feet of track and was built by my mother with help from her friends. When I started
to build this it was sort of uncharted territory. They're very popular in Europe, here there weren't
so many. But I've always been the kind of person that dances to a different drummer. When my mother
was a young girl she built these elaborate model railroads and girls didn't usually played with
trains they played with dolls in those days. I would run those trains all over. Under the
living room table. I started making paper mache tunnels. Now we cut to me I was about six years
old my grandparents bought my first Lionel train set and my father quickly pushed me
out of the way and said I'm taking over these are my trains and my mother then
quickly pushed him out of the way and said you don't know anything about trains I do.
What she did was she took her skills in building model trains that she had developed with my father
as a hobby and she decided to make it into a business designing personalized model train
layouts for people in all scales. I do one that's one side is the winter and the other side is the
summer. I'm not going to tell you how I do that because that's one of my tricks. [Music] So this
is G scale garden scale which is very very big and you saw the Train Museum which is Lionel O
scale all the way down to itty bitty tiny trains which go down as small as Z scale but she only
worked as small as N scale which is still pretty small and she built furniture. I love my train
tables. What they are is a piece of furniture effectively. And you can look down on the top put
your martini glass on top and there are the trains running around. So follow me and this will be an
example of the way my mother has engineered this. I'm going to use a cane as a pointer.
Here the train is flat, then this is on a slightly different level, that's a third level, above it
is a fourth level and then we have a fifth level going past the mountain and the waterfall. Most
famous model railroads let's say at big theme parks that are outside. Like in Orlando Florida,
where the mouse lives. I'm not going to say the name. First they're not this large.
Secondly they are all flat. This railroad is on many levels because as an artist my mother
likes things to be interesting and she likes to do things differently. After she graduated college,
my mother moved to Paris to be an artist. She painted in oil and was quite talented and very
good. All the buildings have been custom made and all of the people have to be painted every
year. People ask if we cover it up in the winter and my mother runs the trains in the snow. I had
a snowplow train, of course it didn't work worth a damn. These trains and train tracks were all built
by Aristocraft. These are quite accurate as model trains go in this scale for the rivet counters
who count the number of revits on the train. They will send me an email to say this is train time do
you know that your freight concept is not valid. Why not? Well you have to put the freight cars
in a certain order. These people are totally insane and need to be put in an institution!
Over here is the railroad turn around and over here is Chicago's Union Station. On top are actual
asphalt shingles and you see them layered and layered and layered on top... now look over there.
Over here is the farm. My mother always has a little farm on her railroads. My father was a
well-known trial attorney and so here you can see the jail where unfortunately some of his clients
end up. Not most of them just some. I wasn't the one that was mad about trains my husband was. For
years and years they had this passion together then my father was diagnosed with stage four
cancer and she said to him if you live I will build you the most amazing model train museum
that anybody has in private hands. It took two and a half years. Six people helping. But I'm
not the one who stands back no I was all in. It gave him something to look forward to. Every day
he would come home and see what the progress was and she finished it and he was able to run it a
few times and then he passed away. So this is a great love letter from my mother to my father.
Most of the models were built from scratch by my mother, some are made out of wood,
some models are made out of plastic and some are kit bashed. Kit bashing is when they take
a kit and meld it together with a different kit to get a totally different building and
of course with her artistic background she was very into the models. There are many different
automations in the Train Museum. Some of these are pre-built, others were custom made by people
who knew how to make the automations. Of course my mother designed everything.
What took a long long time was to develop the scenery that you see on the back walls. She
employed a series of photographers who went around Chicago and took pictures of various buildings,
then printed onto wallpaper and put them together into a Skyline.
So this layout starts in Barrington Illinois. We go through farm country because when we first came
to Barrington over 50 years ago this was all farmland. And from Barrington we go 43 miles
into the city of Chicago. Now because she knows that both young and old would come and enjoy
this layout you look underneath you'll see a level which a two three four-year-old will be
able to see that an adult really can't see. So as we move from Barrington we come to Lincoln
Park. Now underneath this is a hidden nuclear missile silo and the missiles actually shoot.
My mother custom-built Wrigley Field and all the ball players were custom-made.
They wind up, they pitch, it's all very very exciting at Wrigley Field.
The Pritzker Pavilion was designed by Frank Gary the famous architect and my mother made
it using sheet metal. My mother created The Bean which is also known as Cloudgate nine. She
molded it herself out of clay using pictures and then had a cast in a kind of an aluminum
All of these that are bascule bridges and with the flick of a button come up automatically.
There are 64 switches on this model railroad. We can run about seven or
eight trains at once. Well it's very complicated you can see some of the
things underneath there with all the wiring and oh there's just miles and miles of wire. [Music]
My bad! They crash quite often, but these are the old school style these
are very durable you know from the 50s. They're bulletproof.
Right now there's a lot of maintenance. We have to lubricate everything, I have
water features some of those pumps are not working yet, I've got a problem with signals,
there's something wrong there here. It takes a village to keep the whole show running so to
offset the cost of running a big estate like this and the trains and keeping everything
up we have tour groups that come through, we have weddings and birthdays and my mother is the train
that keeps the whole thing on track. The Coolest Thing I've Ever Made were my children. (laughter)
...and then the second coolest thing I ever made were my railroads.
I want to thank you for coming. Well thank you for having us. Oh no, not at all. it's
my pleasure. Is Andrew in the picture? No. Are you sure? He is now. Get out of the picture!
I got to tell everybody what to do.
[Music]