A busy hum fills the room. Tiny streetlights flash, and a miniature locomotive whirs along its tiny track.
Brendan Brosnan looks on, surveying the small near-replica of the Scenic City on the second floor of the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel and thinking of the four decades it took to put it all together.
"A lot of us put a lot of hours into this," Brosnan said.
Brosnan is secretary of the Chattanooga Area Model Railroad Club. He and about 20 others spend their Tuesdays adjusting rails, placing tiny Chattanoogans and tinkering with the pint-sized Incline Railway on the layout.
And they are about to get busier. The layout is getting a new, more prominent home as part of the Choo Choo's $8 million renovation. But the railroad club will have to start from scratch. There's no moving the plaster landscape or fragile buildings, Brosnan said.
The new space will give them the opportunity to use better technology on the new exhibit, but many memories will disappear with the old layout.
"That's the silver lining to losing what you've worked on for 40 years. I built the Bekin's Building on a business trip in Kingsport. I had it all on the table in the hotel room and I just left a note for the maid -- do not disturb. When I came back, they had flipped the paper over and written 'good job,'" Brosnan said.
Staff photo by Doug Strickland
Model trains circle on tracks in the Chattanooga Choo Choo Model Railroad Museum on Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2014, in Chattanooga, Tenn. Builders will be taking down the old model railroad to build a smaller, more modern exhibit.Former Chattanooga Mayor Jon Kinsey, part owner of the hotel, said he hopes the move will be good for the hotel and the railroad club. The new exhibit will be right off the hotel's lobby.
"We think it is a wonderful asset and we want to put it in a location that's much more visible to everybody. The club does a great job with it," Kinsey said. "It's the largest model railroad in the South. We just think it's an important part of the Choo Choo."
Kinsey said there was no definite timeline for when the new layout would open. But the new location will be smaller, about a third the size of the current model, which could take the layouts out of the nation's top five largest such displays. And Kinsey said he was not ready to comment on what will be moving into the place where the trains now run.
Ellen Benelli of Atlanta and her family, visiting from Atlanta, stopped by the miniature railroad Tuesday. It's a bit of a tradition, she said. Now 12 and 16 years old, her two daughters always stop by to see the train setup.
"This is probably the fourth time we've come up, and we always stay at the Choo Choo. We have brought the children up here since they were small, and they always look forward to seeing this," Benelli said.
Brosnan said it took nearly two years of toil and $25,000 to get the current display open to the public in 1975. That's $119,000 in today's money. And back then, the model train club had nearly 60 members. Nowadays, buildings can be made in moments with a 3D printer; LED lights will allow club members to simulate day and night cycles, and the signal system for the new train will be much more advanced, he said.
Still, building a miniature city takes patience, steady hands "and good eyesight. That's what I'm losing," he said.
The current model train setup will close to the public on Jan. 18.
Contact staff writer Louie Brogdon at lbrogdon@timesfreepress.com, @glbrogdoniv on Twitter or at 423-757-6481.