Model Kingdom to Make Whistle-Stop at Mall

Sprawled across the second floor of a cinder-block building in Hawthorne stand two towns, an oil refinery, a shipping port and a string of mountain ranges. Oh, and lest we forget, a gold mine, logging mill and dairy.

Careening past these points is the Great Lakes & Western Railroad, whose pint-size model cars chug along pencil-thin metal tracks. The train shrieks a one-note warning to passersby, including nearly 1-inch-tall plastic mountain climbers scrambling up the faux mountain cliff fashioned from plaster, paper towels and chicken wire.

Mike Cartabiano crosses his arms, observes this Lilliputian kingdom and declares: “I think there is just about one of everything here.”

The GL&W;, as it is known, is a fictional railroad whose environs have been lovingly pieced together by members of the Los Angeles Model Railroad Society, founded in 1974. Cartabiano, 45, is president.

The society consists of 37 members, mostly grown men, who for decades have been tinkering with toy trains in their own little clubhouse of sorts tucked away in a characterless district of offices and warehouses punctuated by a hole-in-the-wall pizza restaurant.

But the society is branching out, planning to chart new territory never before crossed by rails: the Hawthorne Plaza shopping center.

By early fall, the members will have assembled a 12-by-16-foot train set that will crisscross a giant room on the mall’s second floor. By Christmas, free workshops are due to be running to teach children the intricacies of constructing the miniature scenery that wraps around those railroad tracks and gives life to the steel rails and metal trains.

The project serves two purposes. It gives the members a chance to share their art with youngsters, many of whom have never experienced the thrill of train travel. It will also, officials hope, bring in new foot traffic to a mall that has been floundering since it went into receivership in February 1994. Bought in 1995 by Brotherhood Crusade President Danny Bakewell and his partners Lonnie Bunkley and a San Diego firm, the 20-year-old mall will be redesigned, the owners say. In February, they announced they would replace the six-screen movie theater with a 15-screen cinema to boost sales in Hawthorne’s only mall.

But there are still only 73 shops operating in the nearly 1-million-square foot shopping center, compared to an all-time high of 130, according to the mall’s marketing director, Isabel Velasquez.

Hawthorne Mayor Larry Guidi first saw the impressive train layout one night last year at one of the group’s open houses. He was impressed with the stock of 600 train cars and more than half a mile of track looping an ersatz world that represents the railroad line’s imaginary route from Lake Superior, Wis., to the Pacific Coast. Meeting the model train aficionados, he knew there was a way to combine their pastime with an effort to turn around the mall that caters to Hawthorne’s 72,000 residents, 60% of whom are black or Latino.

Members such as Andy Hunter, 57, an electrician, are eager to share skills honed over decades of dealing with the world on a microscopic level. “It is a boost for us to see the pleasure and smiles that are on the kids’ faces,” Hunter said, noting that last year the club had a program with a 4-H Club in Wilmington.

Hunter is one of the club’s founding members and best known for painstaking model making that creates entire entities that look like the real thing.

He spent nearly a year building a miniature refinery that is a replica of the now-closed Shell facility in Lomita. For six months, he studied every pipe, pump and oil tank drawn on the refinery’s 1940 plans.

Working 18 hours a day, seven days a week for three months, he pieced together bits of plastic to come up with a model of the facility for producing heating oil, kerosene and fuel oil. Even the tiny pipes are color coded to match the ones in the real model.

Everything is to scale. One inch in the model train world equals 87 inches in the real world.

“If we could put scale oil in there, we could get scale gas out of it,” said club President Cartabiano, who is also a master model builder. He constructed the container crane for the harbor area, which is modeled after the Port of Long Beach, where containers are transferred between trains and ships.

Cartabiano, president of a company that designs toys and computer games, has been hooked on model trains since he was 2, when his father bought him a Lionel train set. He and the model railroad buffs would like to share that love of trains with more people to carry on their tradition.

One of their newest members is 12-year-old Christopher Jenkins, who joined the club just a few months ago along with his grandfather, Leland Roe, 62, after attending an open house.

Jenkins already had a large model train project set up at home, but it didn’t compare to what he saw--a complex valued at more than $500,000 capable of running 12 trains at a time.

His reaction was: “Wow. This is big.”

Now he’s hooked.