All aboard The Great Train Set!

Experience the engineering marvels and bygone lifestyle of train travel in the early 1950s when you visit one of the most elaborate and detailed model railroads ever built. This amazing new experience at LSC captures the wonder of the Lackawanna Railroad in the era when trains chugged from the grand Hoboken Terminal through scenic small-town New Jersey to coal country in eastern Pennsylvania.

Most of the 1,700-sq.-ft. set is at 1:32 scale, which means an object that is 32 feet long in real life is 1 foot long in the exhibition. Ask any model train enthusiast—that is a very big scale, so every element of the set is impressive and detailed. This enormous set includes up to five trains at a time zooming along 425 feet of railroad track, 132 magnificently detailed model buildings, and nearly 5,000 tiny trees. In addition to the model trains, you’ll see more than two dozen animated people and objects in action at stops along the line–and you can even activate some yourself with the push of a button.

The model may represent the 1950s, but the exhibition has the latest technology. Cameras in the trains stream real-time video to a projector, so you can see the same view that a tiny passenger or engineer would see, projected on the gallery wall.

The Great Train Set is a generous donation from John H. and Regina K. Scully. Mr. Scully has fond boyhood memories of riding the Lackawanna trains to a family vacation home on Cranberry Lake. He gathered an expert team to recreate that experience, drawing on historical photographs and documents for maximum accuracy and detail. It took more than 10 years to build! To share the experience with the public, Scully and his partners worked with the LSC team to make some updates and give the set a spectacular new home.