FAQ’s

Yes, there actually are quite a few original pieces and animations still on the display today. They include the ski slope, ski lodge and ice skaters, Dutch Haven, the Willows, the 2-lane moving highway (in front of Dutch Haven), the farm with the tobacco barn, the Strasburg Fire House, the church beside Dutch Haven and a few other houses. Actually, the church beside Dutch Haven was part of the Groff family’s layout in the late 1940s and is modeled after the First Presbyterian Church in Strasburg, two blocks away from the Groff family home. The farm house with the tobacco barn are actually two of George Groff's original layout buildings put together to make a larger farm house. The house is built from sheets of ¼” balsa wood, the windows are real glass and the curtains are made from the bottom of Gorge's wife, Florence’s slip. That’s what we call “ingenuity”.

Most animations work using the same principle of how a piston in a car’s engine works. A motor turns an arm on which a rod is loosely fastened. As the arm turns around, it pulls and pushes the rod back and forth. The Amishmen sawing use this principle, as do bulldozers, rollers, graders, and the like. There are many more complicated animations on the display that use chain drives, industrial slide rails, gears, pulleys, micro switches, relays and timers.

Gary uses quite a bit of homemade electronic boards. But when he can’t construct something himself, he turns to pre-built Dallee Electronics boards.

Gary has a book that lists every animation which is given a number, what relay box it is connected in, what size fuse it uses and even which cable number and wire color is used up in the control booth. There’s also a list of all the switches on the control panel, their position on the panel and what it operates. He put all this info into an Excel spreadsheet so it can sorted by animation name in alphabetic order, by relay box and relay order and even by cable number and wire color. That comes in handy when an animation isn’t working. Low voltage is a whole other story. To know where a relay board gets its power from, technicians may start at the board and trace the wire by hand. To rewire all the low voltage which would include train power and controls, house lights and car lights, a more considerable about of time may need to be spent.

Sometimes animations wear out and have to be completely re-built from scratch. I don’t rotate them out because we’re always getting new visitors that have never seen them; I just try to add new animations every year. Animations sometimes need new motors which we have in stock. Sometimes a linkage will wear out and most times they can be repaired as well but sometimes, as with the “up” escalator, the plug is pulled and it waits until winter to repair it.

Every engine has a back up. When an engine starts to have problems, it is replaced and then we work on the problem which could be anything from worn roller pick-ups, to worn gears to a bad motor. While the engine is apart, it is lubed and oiled and put on the shelf until the other one needs work. The rolling stock usually gets oiled at the beginning of the season. A light touch of oil on the pin-point bearing is usually all that’s needed. During the year, we’ve have wheels wear out and couplers break which means a trip to the shop and a quick repair made.

The fire scene, which I completely redesigned and upgraded in 2000, uses a very complex series of animations and timers to achieve the effects you see. Eight motors, five timer boards, a number of limit switches, gears, chain, sprockets, lots of brass and aluminum strip stock and hundreds of hours of design work and fabrication goes into a project such as this.

We use an epoxy called PC7 (which can be found in our local hardware stores) over plaster and window screen. The window screen is used to make the basic shape of the stream or pond and the plaster gives the epoxy something to bond to. Ponds and lakes can be made using the same epoxy and then painted with Floquil paints for the desired effect.