Book Review: A Love Story: The Miniature Railroad and Village
Book Review: A Love Story: The Miniature Railroad and Village
Pittsburgh’s most celebrated miniature train village gets a colorful centennial history
Published by the Carnegie Science Center in 2021, A Love Story: The Miniature Railroad and Village by Robert Gangewere and Patricia Everly is a compelling 102-page guide to Pittsburgh’s historically-themed diorama, which debuted during the early 20th century in a bachelor Army veteran’s basement.
Today, the Miniature Railroad and Village showcases certain Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania landmarks: Kaufmann’s downtown department store and Fallingwater, the house Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built for the Kaufmann department store founder, as well as Forbes Field, the original Primanti Bros. and, last Halloween, the stone chapel built in 1923 which was featured in George Romero’s gruesome and influential 1968 horror film, Night of the Living Dead.
The authors describe the story of the miniature village and railroad’s creator, Charles “Charlie” Bowdish (1896-1988) “of Brookville in Jefferson County, about 80 miles north of Pittsburgh.”
Bowdish’s story, which I wrote about for a Pittsburgh publication in an article published today, delves into a family legacy of highly skilled craftsmen, entrepreneurs and showmen who sought to make a living carving wood into miniature and life-sized goods, replicas and models for show, display and amusement. The Bowdish family had served in the Union Army, been inspired at Chicago’s Columbian World’s Fair Exposition of 1893, reconstructed Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds and moved around the Midwest before returning to settle down in Brookville, where “[t]here had been some sort of Bowdish business” since 1838.
Charlie Bowdish wanted to create a miniatures display to amuse guests at his older brother’s wedding—he was George Bowdish’s best man—in 1919. He showed town, historical and biblical recreations in a miniature train diorama which became a Christmas ritual. He never charged an admission fee, never married and never had kids. He also never stopped perfecting what he’d worked his whole life to make:
The display [eventually] took over two and occasionally three second floor rooms in his family’s house and people waited in a long line outside before climbing the stairs to see his entertaining exhibition.… Bowdish was a prolific model builder, and by 1940, after 20 years as a replica craftsman, he had amassed 114 buildings, 397 figures and 300 trees. Even by today’s standards, his early miniature displays were quite sophisticated. They included 107 individual controls on a large switchboard, music, and realistic sound effects that included train whistles that Bowdish recorded onto phonographic records from trains that passed through Brookville. As a reporter described in 1949, “the whole scene is lighted by an elaborate system that creates to perfection the growing day with gradual intensity of lights and tints culminating in the rise of the sun. He designed and fabricated everything he used in the displays and powered all his moving [parts] with motors from automobile horns.”
—Jeffersonian Democrat December 18, 1952
Eventually, two men from Pittsburgh’s Institute of Popular Science (later, the Buhl Planetarium)—the director and a staff physicist—became curious about its popularity when they read an article in the Pittsburgh Press. The physicist, in particular, was impressed with what he saw, comparing Charlie Bowdish to Leonardo da Vinci.
Most of A Love Story: The Miniature Railroad and Village generously features color pictures with detailed, well-researched material about the exhibit, which I’ve visited several times at its location on the banks of the Ohio River. Before and since Charlie Bowdish “packed up his old station wagon” on November 22, 1954 to deliver and reconstruct his miniatures in the south gallery of the Buhl, which, in 1991, was purchased by and moved to Carnegie Science Center, the fascinating, intricately handmade diorama has drawn enthusiasts, tourists and scholars from across the world.
Co-author Patricia Everly curates historic scientific exhibits and co-author Robert Gangewere is a longtime Pittsburgh writer. Together, they chronicle the primary facts and basic history of the Bowdish, subsequent and current displays, which have been secularized, re-sized to the current O scale and confined to a regional focus on Western Pennsylvania. The showcase’s most striking feature may be a model of the Sharon steel mill in Farrell, Pennsylvania (75 miles northwest of Pittsburgh near the Ohio border) in Mercer County—“the largest replica to date”—which was added in 1992. “It was selected because it was small enough to reproduce and it had been operating since 1900 and had ample sets of original blueprints and archival photographs for the modelers.”
They write:
Here, there are no sides to the giant casthouse so you can see the fiery processes inside. Adherence to its original sprawling footprint would have made it even larger. Steel mills need vast spaces with large rail yards for trains bringing raw supplies and large dumps to discard waste products. A number of animations depict how it works. A clamshell bucket lowers from a long ore bridge to scoop ore and other raw materials from the yard below and carry it to the skip cars, which transport the iron ore, coke, and limestone to the top of a blast furnace like giant measuring cups and dump them in. Orange lights glow from the cast house floor to simulate flowing molten pig iron, and orange ingots appear to shine as they cool. This miniature may be one of the easiest ways to visualize the process.”
The Forbes Field model recreates baseball’s opening day on June 30, 1909, when “…more than 30,000 baseball fans [attended] to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates face off against the Chicago Cubs.” Constructed in four months, the stadium was one of Major League baseball’s first steel-and-concrete arenas, featuring new technology, including underground automobile parking, turf from an Ohio sod farm, public toilets for women, public telephones and washing machines to clean athletic uniforms.
Advertised as showcasing “how people lived, worked, and played in our region before 1940,” the Miniature Railroad and Village affords a range of Pittsburgh and area buildings, landscapes, properties, farms and parks as well as the trains, which were once sponsored and provided by the Lionel company. The museum adds a new building once a year—this year’s will be a children’s hospital—and maintains, repairs and posts key facts about the replicas on display.
Happily, Pittsburgh’s reverence for capitalism thrives, at least in some respects. A model of George Westinghouse’s company office building, like the modified steel factory, offers a glimpse of the Industrial Revolution. The authors note that:
George Westinghouse was one of Pittsburgh‘s greatest innovators. In 1869, Westinghouse patented his air brake, and invention that enabled train engineers to stop safely and with more accuracy. After proving alternating-current electric power could more efficiently distribute electricity, Westinghouse founded Westinghouse Electric in Pittsburgh in 1886, and began working with Nikola Tesla to deliver alternating current to local homes and businesses…As his business grew, Westinghouse commissioned architect Frederick J. Osterling to build a company office building, referred to as “the Castle,“ in Wilmerding. The grand headquarters offered employees a swimming pool, bowling alleys, a restaurant, and a library. It also had a tower that contained steel vault on each floor. Westinghouse had all valuable documents, plans, and drawings stored in the tower daily in case of fire. The model itself, added to the display in 2003, is so large the clocktower had to be constructed separately. Its size and detail draw many visitors’ eyes straight to the back left corner of the miniature city. The comparatively mammoth model honors Pittsburgh’s innovative spirit.”
Featured models include the Indiana County courthouse, the entrance to Luna Park, the original Heinz factory, a rollercoaster and the house depicted on Pittsburgh’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood TV show. According to the book, Omaha, Nebraska train and railroad enthusiast Warren Buffett wrote a handwritten note about the miniature railroad after visiting the display, exclaiming: “The Forbes Field model looks terrific!” Rock musician Neil Young, formerly part owner of the Lionel model train company, has visited several times. The huge second floor display, with written descriptions and varying nighttime and daytime simulations in animation and light, is a wonder. Its marvels lie in the laboriously crafted models of this historic American showcase.
As Everly writes:
Charlie Bowdish built his original models with bass or balsa wood and art board. He also repurposed materials like cereal boxes and dried corn husks for shake shingles. Charlie pioneered unique techniques such as melting beeswax, which is carved to re-create stonework and tree bark. It is also useful for waterproofing boats that glide across the river. We still use his meticulous tree-making method by twisting copper wire to form the trunk and branches and attaching dried wild hydrangea for the leaves. Wild hydrangea, which we harvest ourselves, is native to this area and often found on steep banks. We still incorporate natural materials whenever possible, such as using cooked angel hair pasta to replicate scrollwork on the Liverpool Street row house porches. Dried tapioca balls represent the pumpkins in the autumn scenes, and grains of rice transform into ears of corn. For anyone who has ever thought of building a model, especially children, it doesn’t have to be an expensive undertaking. Use your imagination and what is available around the house or in your backyard — this is part of the fun! Think like Charlie and find the potential in basic household items and simple supplies found at craft stores.”
A Love Story: The Miniature Railroad and Village, a coffee table friendly hardcover priced at $40 (a portion of each sale supports the exhibit), is a valuable account and history of a treasured showcase; it exists to preserve—not destroy—stories of the lives, facts and industry of Western Pennsylvania’s past.
Buy A Love Story: The Miniature Railroad and Village
