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All aboard! Visitors are enjoying the 7th Annual Odd Fellows Christmas Trains Display with its elaborate multi-leveled set up featuring more than 900-feet of track, dozens and dozens of trains and cars and even villages dotting the various routes. Ron Merson |
Odd Fellows Christmas Trains drawing
visitors to historic Main Street
December 10, 2014
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula News
There were more than 100 people on the platform when the Christmas Train Display pulled out of the station at the Odd Fellows Lodge where this year’s nostalgic celebration of the holidays will be riding the rails until the last weekend in December.
And visitors will be able to try to win a train set of their very own with one G-scale and one HO set to be raffled off. In addition, guests will have the chance to count the displayed nutcrackers - a show in themselves - for a chance to win a framed, signed and numbered Wendell Dowling print of the famed Odd Fellows Clock Tower (868 E. Main St.) and other assorted Odd Fellows items.
Chief Engineer Wes Easley, who owns a majority of the trains and oversees the elaborate display, said this year’s 7th annual opening on November 29 drew “Just shy of a hundred people who came to experience it,” including residents from throughout Ventura County and a visitor from Ohio.
Said Easley, “I’ve had lots of calls of inquiry from people that had our flyer from last year and were confirming if we were doing the display again this year.”
And Easley noted the display is worth several return visits during its run, which ends when the train pulls out of the station for the last time on Sunday December 28: “We have added more track since the opening and estimate there is approx 900 or so feet of track. The display is fluid throughout its run as we are continually updating it.”
As it is there’s more than enough to see with a special reproduction of the famed 1887 Santa Paula Depot handcrafted down to miniature doors and doorknobs by Easley, a special display by Odd Fellow and fellow train collector Carlos Juarez and pieces from others’ collections.
The hundreds of feet of track are on multi-levels to carry dozens and dozens of engines and cars from vintage days of railroading to modern sleek vehicles passing all types of villages and towns, including a scale model of Santa Paula’s own Depot built by Easley.
The Christmas Train Display is perhaps the most elaborate in Ventura County filling the Odd Fellows second story great room surrounded by upholstered chairs for those who would like to just relax and watch the trains, a feeling that Easley said is “comforting and to some, almost hypnotic...
“Kids, adults whatever, no one can resist the trains.”
The next opening will be for regular December hours of Fridays 6-9 p.m., Saturdays 4-9 p.m. and Sundays 1-6 p.m.
The last regular showing will be Sunday, December 28.
Easley said, “Entry donations are the same as last year,” with kids 5 to12 years old $1, everyone over 13 years old only $3. Kids under 5 years old are free!
Special group/family/business showings may be arranged for almost any time and day.
For any questions, to make arrangements for special viewings or to learn about handicapped access - there is an elevator in the rear of the building (off South Alley) for use by those who don’t take the stairs - call Easley at 805-766-4400.
All proceeds from the event go to the rehabilitation/restoration of the historic Odd Fellows building and Clock Tower, a structure so well known it is often used as a logo signifying Santa Paula.
