From The Washington Post
Expecting a little roadside diversion, I’d stumbled onto what Guinness has called the biggest model railroad on the planet — and we were only a quarter of the way through it! Yet the spectacle of the thing kept me, my son and his grandfather enraptured. For Northlandz is an awe-inspiring world unto itself, a monument to one man’s obsession with trains. Forget any notion of shopping mall Christmas displays, or anything your uncle labored over in his basement: Northlandz makes a claim for wonder-of-the-world status….
And what a world. Room after room features enormous train displays that run nearly floor to ceiling. And everywhere you look there are intricately wrought scenes of small-town life, farm life, city life and railroad life. There are more than 100 trains — many running all day long — eight miles of track, 4,000 buildings, 400 bridges (one of them 40 feet long), a half-million “lichen trees,” a 30-foot mountain. Northlandz also features a 94-room dollhouse, a doll museum, a 2,000-pipe organ and a three-quarter scale replica of a steam engine that takes passengers on pleasant sojourns through the woods.