Miniature museums offer tiny peek at boating, fishing and trains
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VANCOUVER, B.C. - It's hard not to feel enormous in these Granville Island museums.
Step into the model-boat collection, and you dwarf a wee whale, shrunken sailors and Lilliputian logs.
Walk through the sport-fishing displays, and you loom over little bitty lures.
Follow the wail of the whistles to the model trains, and suddenly you're taller than 6,000 teeny trees.
Once you get past the Amazon attitude, though, it's hard not to develop a colossal admiration for these miniature marvels - and for the full-size folks who build them.
It was that admiration - coupled with a sizable personal collection and a desire to preserve Canadian heritage - that led owner/curator/director John Keith-King to create this three-in-one showcase.
Keith-King's tribute is displayed in three museums, on two floors, under one roof (and one admission price), in the Maritime Market building on Granville Island, an artsy, urban island plop in the middle of Vancouver, B.C.
The Sport Fishing and Model Ships museums opened in 1997; the Model Train Museum opened just eight months ago.
In the past year, Keith-King said, 35,000 to 40,000 people have visited the museums.
Model ships
Visitors are directed first to the Model Ships Museum, where more than 50 scaled-down naval, commercial and pleasure vessels are displayed in lighted glass cases beneath colorful maritime flags dangling from the ceiling. Most of the intricately detailed models include typed fact sheets on the ships and their role in history; many also feature historic photographs or newspaper clippings about the full-size ships.
"Old Ironsides" is there, along with the story behind the famous nickname - during the War of 1812, cannonballs bounced right off her 21-inch-thick oak sides.
There's a working radio-controlled replica of Captain Nemo's "Nautilus" submarine from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and a model of the FF Balaena, a whale-factory ship complete with a tiny whale carcass and specks of ruby whale blood on the deck. Upstairs are little trollers, tugs, gillnetters and a barge toting kindling-size logs.
But these mini ships pale in the wake of the 13-foot-long model of the HMS Hood, with launches and lifeboats cast in bronze. It took British Columbian Rodney Henriksen 20 years to construct the 700-pound behemoth from scratch.
Sport fishing
The Sport Fishing Museum has more than 500 classic and antique reels, including what's billed as the world's largest publicly displayed collection of Hardy Brothers reels.
Everywhere - on the walls, in drawers, on pullout-poster boards - are framed photos of fish, fishermen and their lures. One display houses 19th-century brass and alloy crank reels. Tall, thin cases are filled with old, meticulously detailed fly rods. An ancient tackle box overflows with faded bobbers. Mounted fish - some real, some not - arc along the walls along with fish-themed artwork. There are old nets, brass scales, line-dryers, ice-fishing decoys - and quite a collection of old-fashioned fish-killers called "bonkers."
One, a 5-1/4-inch-long stainless steel gadget with a solid metal ball at one end, advertises: "Ball Makes Fish Quiet." Beyond the bonkers, en route to the upstairs Model Train Museum, visitors can try out the Man-U-Troll, a 1930s-era outboard that requires the boater to pump a handle to turn the propeller.
Model trains
In the Model Train Museum, huge beechwood cabinets display the trains, arranged on glass shelves by make and gauge. Aster Live Steam-Gauge 1 fills one cabinet; Lionel-Standard Gauge, another. Some cars pull matchstick-size logs; circus cars contain an elephant and rhino, each no bigger than a mouse.
Toy trains of all makes and models - American Flyer, Lionel, Hornby - line more cases. Framed displays of train stamps line the walls. A model train sits in a layout of Longhope, England. Most people linger at the "O Gauge" layout, an 80-foot-long, floor-to-ceiling model train diorama that took Keith-King's team more than a year to build.
Five lines travel four levels through 6,000 handmade trees past ponds and boats, over bridges, through tunnels and along trestles. Piped-in train sounds add to the railway realism.
The layout itself, which evolved from one built in the 1930s by Geoff Meugens, is built on 2-by-4 wooden frames. The mountains and terrain are sheets of Styrofoam covered with orthopedic bandages. Each branch of every tree was glued on by hand.
For Keith-King, 60, who grew up among "train people" in Hamilton, Ontario, the layout is yet another tribute - to his family, to his layout team and to Meugens
Sites along the tracks are named after Keith-King's family; the lines themselves after those who helped construct the sculpture.
A developer and architect for 30 years, Keith-King said his favorite job has always been building the models.
It still is.
Next stop: a tiny mining town and miniature mountain goats.