drex files:

Up! Up, and Away! The largest model airport in the world.

Comment: I just read the other day Rod Stewart, the singer is a modeller and models “Three Rivers” from the 1940s sometimes seen in the hobby magazines or online. Then there’s Neil Young’s connection to Lionel. Years gone by someone hand-lettered a Long Island Railroad highway overpass bridge “LIONEL” near Stony Brook University in NY. MIT’s layout is also legend. I’ve recently used the RPI layout of northern New York in my study of North Creek, NY, where Teddy Roosevelt caught a special train for Buffalo, NY, having been sworn in as the new President, McKinley had died from a gunshot wound eight days before. Rail was extended from the garnet mine rail-head to Tahawas, where, titanium oxide was mined said to have painted the tanks in Europe white during WWII, once cited as the “world’s largest titanium mine” closed in the early 1960s. The RPI layout helped me imagine a previous time, where perhaps the first skiing was done by the public, inspired by the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. One of the last stage-coach robberies happened there around 1903. There’s a train-ride and back to Riparius, NY there during the summer along the beautiful Hudson River, where once the hemlock trees supplied four tanneries raw material to tan 10,000 animal skins, reportedly from all over the world, in the late 19th century.

There’s also a historic miniatures model for different time periods there in North Creek to depict the different time periods there, about HO scale I think which helps describe the hamlet. One “great outdoors” store had a stream with fish running through it underfoot a large aquarium. The historic “Ski-Bowl” now has a connector to nearby Gore Mountain which the State of New York now runs.