About Us

Spark Your Imagination

The Bay State Model Railroad Museum was originally established in 1968 in Roslindale, MA as an O and HO Scale oriented model railroad club including both trolley and narrow gauge on the HO, and railroad and trolley on the O scale. In late 1977 we were evicted from that space. As an organization, we elected to try to continue our existence and bought a rather run down building also in the Roslindale section of Boston. It took better than a year of back-breaking work, largely completed by members, to rehabilitate our building to support our club. We also had to recruit, manage, and evict commercial tenants, pay taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. All were activities well beyond the expectations of members who had originally joined the club to build railroads and to run their trains. That transition is documented in an article appearing in the April 1982 Model Railroader Magazine entitled "Moving the Mountains".

Twenty years later (January 2002) a second article appeared in Model Railroader Magazine entitled "Building for the Future". This was focused to illustrate our twenty year experiences of owning a building, and to assist readers to determine if such a venture is a viable option for a model railroad club. In this building we also included N scale in the desire to expand our offerings to modelers who are into N scale. An article focusing on the N scale layout was published in the June 2009 issue of Model Railroader Magazine.

In July 2005 Model Railroader Magazine published another article, this time exclusively about the HO scale, entitled, "Big and Getting Bigger", discussing why an eastern model railroad club would build a western-oriented railroad, and also showing the plans for the developing eastern section of the railroad. In that article, a few of the pictures included glimpses of the HOn3 which precipitated a "Trackside Photo" in August 2008 Model Railroader Magazine of a K-27 leading a freight train hugging the Highline reminiscent of the prototype at Rockwood Colorado. We are very honored that this August 2008 picture is now being used on the Model Railroader Magazine subscriber website. We are further honored to report that the HOn3 railroad has appeared in Great Model Railroads 2010, a publication of Kalmbach Publishing.