The Twin City Railroad Museum in St. Paul, MN is facing closure. The Museum, which features an amazing O scale representation of Minneapolis-St. Paul in the 1950s-60s, and a great Toy Train Museum, is unable to pay the rent on its current home at Bandana Square and must move.
More info on my blog at http://cprailmmsub.blogspot.ca/2015/10/end-of-line-for-twin-city-model.html
John Longhurst, Winnipeg
Unfortunately, this has kinda been in the works for a long time. I think the change to an office complex really hurt it - I’m sure when it was stores and restaurants the layout was a draw that ended up with people spending money in the shopping center. Now I’m sure the owners could get more money out of the space with a tech company or law firm.
Yeah, I hope they can find a new place. Union depot would be nice, but apparently it is too small? I loved going to this place, and it would be sad to see it go.
The latest is that the original club’s two-rail layout will be kept open thru March 2016, but the toy train museum housed in the “chimneys building” across the street will close in a few days.
Unfortunately the main two-rail layout is in no way portable, so I imagine will be torn down and they will have to start over in a new location. It might be possible to do something in SPUD (right now it’s pretty empty) but having had to move out of there once, they may not want to do it again. (Perhaps the Mill City museum in Mpls, or the Children’s Museum in St.Paul would work?)
Before the current layout was begun, they had a portable layout that they brought to the state fair and train shows, may be that they’ll have to do that for a while until they can start on a new “permanent” layout.
http://www.tcmrm.org/1961/twin-city-model-railroad-museums-hearing-press-release/