Toy trains find a welcome berth

The California State Railroad Museum is thinking small these days. And that’s not a bad thing.

The museum, which maintains more than 200 full-size historic cars in Sacramento and in Railtown 1897 State Historic Park in Jamestown, Calif., will open a sprawling gallery Aug. 14 at its Sacramento museum that will display hundreds of toy trains, some of which date to the late 1800s. Many are rare, and about a third sport their original boxes and literature.

The trains are from a 7,000-piece collection that Thomas W. Sefton, a retired San Diego banker, donated to the museum in 2002, said Stephen Drew, chief curator.

A passionate collector -- and a museum board member -- Sefton maintained the equivalent of three football fields of track in his attic, Drew said; the overflow of rolling stock resided in a warehouse. It took nine workers nine weeks to box up the treasures, which filled five moving vans, to send to the museum in early 2003.

The 3,300-square-foot gallery has room to display about a third of Sefton’s collection, which focuses on pre-World War II sets made by Lionel and its competitors. Among the highlights are a 1920s roundhouse and gondola (open-air) cars from a first-generation 1902 Lionel set -- two of only five known pieces from the set, Drew said.

The oldest Sefton items are wind-up trains from the 1890s; the museum’s regular collection includes 1860s pull trains. Sefton collected cars as small as 2 inches long and as large as 8 feet long, full-scale models built by hobbyists.

The centerpiece of the opening exhibit at the Thomas W. Sefton Gallery of Toy Trains, Drew said, will be a four-track operating layout with “lots of animation and lights” and day/night versions of diverse scenery -- rivers, flatlands, mountains and residential areas. A tiny camera will broadcast the “engineer’s” view of the track.

The gallery is included with admission to the museum: $6 adults, $2 ages 6 to 12, free for those younger than 5. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. (916) 445-6645, www.californiastaterailroadmuseum.org.