What's unexpected is just how many buildings, peaks, tunnels and bridges actually make up Northlandz.
To describe Northlandz as a model railroad would be a bit like calling the Grand Canyon just a hole in the ground. While technically accurate, it doesn't begin to hint at its size, scale and scope. Northlandz, you see, isn't just a model railroad. It's the world's largest model railroad, filling a 52,000-square-foot building located just outside of downtown Flemington.
Everything you'd expect from a model railroad is there: tiny buildings, majestic peaks and trains that zip through tunnels, around curves and over meticulously constructed bridges. What's unexpected is just how many buildings, peaks, tunnels and bridges actually make up Northlandz.
Bruce Williams Zaccagnino, Northlandz's owner and creator, can recite the attraction's mind-boggling statistics off the top of his head. More than 50,000 feet of track. Up to 90 trains running at any given time. A landscape made out of 200,000 pounds of plaster. More than 4,000 miniature buildings and roughly 400 bridges.
Northlandz is so big, in fact, that it must be displayed in increments, with a walkway taking guests around, through and even above the elaborate landscapes. Small signs point out visitors' progress along the route ("You are now 2 percent through the tour"), as well as the names of individual areas within the model, such as Mansion Row, Iron Valley and Atlas Canyon.
Throughout Northlandz, eagle-eyed visitors can pick out a wealth of details. A stunt plane doing flips above a mountain range, leaving cottony curlicues in its wake. An amusement park, replete with wooden roller coaster, carousel and Ferris wheel. A parade heading down a miniature Main Street, marching band and all. Everywhere you look are remnants of a bygone era. Telephone booths. General stores. Downtown movies theaters showing "The African Queen."
The 3299 comes 'round the mountain at the Northlandz model railroad museum in Flemington. It's a heaping slice of Americana that accomplishes the nifty feat of making visitors simultaneously feel as large as giants and as small as little kids.
That's not surprising, seeing how Zaccagnino first became fascinated with toy trains while playing with them around the Christmas tree as a young boy. The hobby stuck with him into adulthood and, when his first home was being built in 1972, Zaccagnino made sure to include space in his basement for a model railroad.
As that railroad grew, so did his basement. Soon, he started opening the display to paying guests twice a year, with the proceeds going to local charities. In the early '90s, demand to see the model railroad was growing as space to house it was running out. That's when Zaccagnino, a successful developer of software games, decided to rebuild it as an old-fashioned roadside attraction.
"It's kind of evolved," he says with deadpan understatement.
That evolution involved more than four years of construction and a complete rebuilding and expansion of his beloved model railroad. Northlandz opened in the last week of 1996 and has been welcoming visitors from around the world ever since.
Zaccagnino says that some visitors return to tell him they were inspired to start building their own model railroads. "I hope that people are super-inspired," he says of Northlandz. "This is a gift to the world."