(soft music) - [Anthony] The Lehigh & Keystone Valley Model Railroad Museum is a 5,000 square foot HO train layout.

Club started in 1989 in Allentown and then moved to Bethlehem in 1996.

Going with the HO scale was ideal, was a good medium.

It's not too small where people can't see stuff, but it's also the right size to get that detail in of both the trains and the scenery items.

I've been a member of the Lehigh Keystone Valley Club, I think about 2013 or 2014, and what really got me to dialed into it was the, well the historic stuff was great, but the operating sessions I really enjoy.

I'm a railroader at career, but that's current railroading.

That's gets old, but this is stuff you can't, it happened already and we do kinda like you do a historic reenactment of like the way they do Civil War reenactments we do with trains and it's like a big strategy game to get all the cars moved where they have to go.

I originally started coming in 2011 to do operating sessions and I loved it.

I couldn't get enough of it and I had to like, I have to be here.

This is a lot of fun.

(train horn bellowing) The layout is a double decked.

There's 1300 freight cars in the layout and over 300 locomotives.

We feature three major railroads in history of the area, Hanford Site railroad.

All of them pretty much went from Wilkes-Barre, Scranton area through the long Lehigh River and then into New Jersey.

It's the one thing that everyone, they come here, they're immediately impressed by.

It works like a real railroad.

We run an operating session.

The cars come in from their various places.

They get sorted out to their destination and get sent on a different train.

They get carried off to that destination, whether it be a local industry, it be something across the country or getting shipped to the port in New Jersey to go overseas.

On the layout we have key points in the area that are visually appealing.

We've done a very good job at reproducing Jim Thorpe.

It's a street corner.

The lighting, the buildings, the Jim Thorpe train station that's there to this day.

One of the first 3D printed kits we actually engineered it in-house.

That probably took well over a year.

If you get up close and look at it, the detail is to the wire.

Where I'm sitting right now is in front of Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

If you get a little miniature car and drive up the hill there, it looks just like it does today, except that the times have changed a little bit, but the roads are still the same and the hill is still the same.

The buildings are pretty much there.

A lot of the buildings are all handmade.

Huber Breaker, all scratch built.

It probably took a year or two to build that building.

It's even got little details down to Windows that are propped open.

Bethlehem Steel is at our big center point of the railroad here.

They made so many things that are staples of this country.

The Verrazzano-Narrows bridge was a product of Bethlehem Steel.

The Empire State Building components of that was made out of Bethlehem Steel, and if you've driven over the Golden Gate Bridge, that is another product of Bethlehem Steel.

Bethlehem Steel had so many things in so many parts of this country that really built the place and these railroads were all a part of that.

(soft music) The Lehigh is another key player in the area running from Jersey City and then up to Wilkes-Barre to Coxton Yard.

Carrier of Anthracite coal was a main key for them.

They also had some wonderful passenger trains, the John Wilkes, which ended in that Coxton Wilkes-Barre area.

(train horn bellowing) I think it's important to have something like is a museum but it is also an operating miniature railroad.

It's a miniature moving piece of history and I think this is really important because it's a passion and I think this passion of connecting both the history and model railroading is something really unique because it gives you an opportunity to preserve history in a climate controlled, air conditioned environment.

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