After years of wanting to go, I finally got a chance to check out the festivities at Galesburg Railroad Days in Galesburg, Illinois. One of the biggest events going on during the weekend is the train show & swap meet, held on the campus of Carl Sandburg College. This was the biggest train show I’ve ever been to so far, with several buildings filled with vendors and operating layouts of various scales. In the gymnasium where the video starts, I filmed two N scale layouts that were running. I’ve never seen this much N scale operating anywhere before – it was really cool! The larger layout appeared to be based on actual railroads in Illinois. After that, we briefly visit an HO scale layout set up by the Great River Railroad club out of Burlington, Iowa. This layout may look familiar to you as it’s the same one that runs every year at the train show in Ottumwa. It looked like a few modules were left out to make it fit into the classroom it was in.
In the next building, in a spot called “Boxcar Express” (a college restaurant, I think), we see another HO layout, and a large setup of LEGO trains and accessories from Joe’s Brick Depot ( All trains operating on the layout are custom-built, and quite impressive.
In a room on the 2nd floor of building ‘C’, we see another collection of small trains, in N, Z, and even T scale, perhaps the smallest scale of all (they make Z scale look big!), followed by another small N scale layout in a neighboring room.
The journey ends with a large O scale layout, which also features a loop of S scale track. Operating on the layout is an MTH Union Pacific turbine locomotive, and a RailKing Amtrak Genesis pulling heavyweight coaches. This was one of my favorites of the event since I’m an O gauge guy, and ended up buying a few pieces of Lionel rolling stock that was being sold in the same room.
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