I would hesitate to recommend Alhambra as a trendy vacation spot and I would certainly suggest you avoid the bleak industrial district where we found ourselves but, location notwithstanding, the Sierra Pacific Lines is one of the country's better model railroads. Its thousands of feet of track snake through scenery ranging from flat, sprawling freight and passenger yards to rugged mountains. Its fascinating trains range from highly detailed and realistic steam locomotives to beautifully decorated diesels. And it offers enough mainline and industrial switching operation to satisfy the most demanding railfan.

Its members had hand spiked every foot of the nickel silver rail to individual wooden ties and the trains functioned flawlessly. They crept smoothly and silently across delicate trestles spanning deep gorges, they clung to narrow mountain ledges beside sheer rock faces above deep chasms. And they leaned gently into graceful, superelevated curves through both foothills and flatlands.

The lighting effects alone were worth the drive. "Morning" broke as an orange/pink aura silhouetting the horizon, gradually warming the cool gray skies to a clear light blue. By late "afternoon" the shadows seemed to lengthen and the sky turned yellow. In the early "evening" those tones deepened to orange, then almost to red and finally to indigo before night engulfed the layout and the lights in virtually every structure came on. The trains were visible only as moving headlights or as a long series of dark shapes passing before large, illuminated factory windows.

The layout is indoors so when the Sierra Pacific's members run trains they have no weeds to pull, no branches to prune, and no leaves to blow off their layout. They have complete control over nature, from the time of day they recreate to the kind of terrain they represent. No little animals dig holes in their roadbed or knock over their structures, no ants march in columns on their track, no snails or insects eat their foliage and, because all the track is at least waist-high, no visitors walk on their right-of-way.

Some structures, cars, and locomotives are fragile and have a lot of detail. But the realistic weathering comes from paints and stains instead of from the elements, so every building, locomotive, and piece of rolling stock on the Sierra Pacific stays on the layout all the time. Nobody ever has to "take in the good stuff".

Ken and Kitten and Irv stood silently at the entrance, drinking in the vast vista before them. They moved in silent awe around the layout, occasionally stopping to crane a neck or stand on a tiptoe better to behold a particular model or feature or operation. They scrutinized the scale scenery, remarked upon the realistic rolling stock, and contemplated the complete colossal and complex accomplishment.

With characteristic loquacious ebullience, Irv grunted an approving, "Ah." Ken was equally moved and answered, "Mm." Finally we had studied all there was and, with some reluctance, agreed to leave.

When we were back in the car with the heater warming us again, Kitten Borgers said, "I didn't think that was so great. All the trains were too small and I don't care how much detail they had, they looked like toys."

That is because the Sierra Pacific Lines is an HO scale layout.

The Meadowbrook Lines indoor layout Sam Muncy built in Napa, California for Ron Birtcher is a 1:22.5 scale layout (our feature story about it begins on page 41). The room is smaller than that of the Sierra Pacific Lines but the trains and scenery are four times bigger. The level of detail and the skill of execution are outstanding. It enjoys every other advantage of a large indoor layout.

All it really lacks is natural sunlight and fresh air. Ron periodically deals with the latter deficiency by opening a window.

Kitten Borgers would be impressed. We hope you will be, too. And you thought we wrote only about outdoor layouts.