(The following article by Jere Downs was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on November 9.)
PHILADELPHIA — Think of this as Christmas trimming, SEPTA-style.
‘Tis nearly the season for the Magical Holiday Railroad to be making its run around the lobby of the transit agency’s Center City headquarters. In what is widely regarded as one of the most elaborate G-scale displays in the country, 10 model trains tootle along 1,000 feet of track, past snowy mountains 15 feet tall, twinkling pines, miniature Philadelphia landmarks, and hordes of life-size gawkers.
Or used to. This year, the whole kit and caboose will be sitting out the holidays in the Grinch’s attic.
The savings for budget-crunched SEPTA: $40,000.
“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” said Allen Biehler, Pennsylvania Secretary of Transportation, when told the trains wouldn’t be rolling. “I hope we can find better ways to fund public transportation.”
The five-year-old Magical Holiday display is the latest sacrifice to SEPTA’s fiscal 2004 deficit, which has been whittled since spring from $54 million to a still-formidable $26 million. To forestall fare hikes and severe service reductions on real trains and buses, the agency has scavenged for economies, from halving tuition reimbursement for employees to shrinking cleaning crews at Center City stations.
The ax had hung over the little railroad since summer, as SEPTA searched for a corporate Santa to sponsor it. When none came forward – well, whomp.
“It is heartbreaking,” conceded spokesman Richard Maloney, but $40,000 “is the cost of paying a bus driver for a year.”
The news was a shock to the creator of the Magical Holiday Railroad, Paul Busse, a Kentucky model builder who spends each fall fashioning Lilliputian landscapes and laying G-scale track (about 1/20th life-size) all over the East.
“It was a bummer,” he said. SEPTA managers, he continued, “didn’t want to look like they were spending extra money.”
As he had done since 1998, Busse and six helpers were planning to come to Philadelphia this week to assemble the 2,100-square-foot display at 1234 Market St. – a $34,000 job requiring 50 pounds of loose plastic snow, 25 rolls of blanket snow, 20 pounds of glitter, 300 artificial trees, bushels of plastic holly, poinsettia and spruce, and lots of chicken wire.
This year, though, SEPTA “kept putting me off,” said Busse, 54. “It got to the point where I had to order snow if they wanted to do it.”
Instead of heading for Philly, he is packing his two trailers for a trip to the Bronx, to set up the New York Botanical Garden’s famed display. Busse – who makes his replicas from natural materials and preserves them in urethane – will be adding a six-foot-tall RCA Building constructed of bark, with a mini Rockefeller Center skating rink at its base, and a 58-inch-tall St. Patrick’s Cathedral with stained-glass windows of lichen, cinnamon stick shavings, willow twigs and poppy seeds.
SEPTA had gotten wind of Busse’s artistry when he created a garden railroad that tripled ticket sales at the Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill in the summer of 1998.
The transit agency and the arboretum struck a deal. SEPTA gave Morris free advertising on buses. Morris lent SEPTA 17 Busse buildings, worth $500 to $2,500 each. They included a foot-tall Betsy Ross House with pine-bark shingles and an acorn doorknob, and a four-foot-tall Independence Hall, its window mullions tenderly formed from cattail reed and its gutters from honeysuckle root.
Busse set to work with his circular saw, wire clippers and staple gun to mimic the forested valleys and Wissahickon-schist crags of the Philadelphia region. SEPTA’s Transit Museum Store provided tooting trains. And the Magical Holiday Railroad was born.
“Instead of just the cold corporate building, it showed the heart of SEPTA,” said Kathleen Sullivan, Morris Arboretum’s marketing director.
The display, which grew to seven times its original size, offered fleeting relief to families on holiday shopping trips.
“Children act the way we would all like to. They are not afraid to show the joy,” said Peter Wine, of Dayton, Ohio, one of Busse’s assistants.
“They scream and yell,” said Earl Snyder, 81, a retired assistant engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad who has helped set up the buildings. “I have seen many tantrums because kids don’t want to leave.”
(Maybe it was the sugar. The Magical Holiday Railroad’s $40,000 annual budget included thousands of free candy canes.)
SEPTA has only trimmed the holiday spirit, not excised it. Artificial trees will grace the space where the little trains ran. And on Black Friday, the agency will surprise regional rail riders by planting Santa and his elves – with coloring books, crayons and kazoos to hand out – on one of the trains bound for Market East. The cost of that: about $10,000.
SEPTA general manager Faye Moore “is tight,” Joseph Casey, chief financial officer, said by way of compliment. “You have to realize… we are changing how we do business here.”
For now, the trains and dozens of little buildings are packed in Busse’s Kentucky warehouse. The 17 historic miniatures are back at Morris Arboretum, to be displayed there.
And next year?
Bennett Levin, Licenses and Inspections chief under Mayor Ed Rendell and Philadelphia’s most famous rail aficionado, suggests that SEPTA set up the display itself.
“SEPTA doesn’t have to spend $40,000,” said Levin, 62, who owns several full-sized Pennsy engines and rail cars. “Employees could do it.”
Bob Moore, a 46-year-old machinist at SEPTA’s Fern Rock shop, is game.
“We have enough guys with trains in their basements that have amazing displays,” he said. “We would get some track, and cloth that looks like snow, and build a mountain.”