Trains are easily my favorite way to travel, so much so that I have a never-ending length of railroad track tattooed around my wrist.

I love trains in part because they’ve taken me to some fabulous places: across France from Paris to the Mediterranean, over the expanses of Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian. And I appreciate railroads because they inevitably take the more interesting route. Where highways pass though endless miles of tepid strip malls, a train will cut through the heart of the land, sharing the kind of secrets interstates rarely divulge.

Most of all, I love trains because they are such powerful engines for the imagination. As a rail passenger, you’re asked to do nothing more than stare out the window and daydream. Give a dreamer— a Woody Guthrie or Jack Kerouac or Wes Anderson— a train, and you get great art back.

So I was happy to find on a recent visit to the Great Falls Model Railroad Club in Auburn that imagination and enthusiasm are in bountiful supply.

“You get the bug,” club member Paul Lodge told me as he showed me the expansive model railroads on site. Lodge is a model railroad lifer. Now retired, he’s been creating model train layouts since he was about 11 years old.

“This is a hobby that keeps kids interested in something other than watching TV,” he said, seemingly unaware of the irony given that he’s produced more than 230 episodes of a public access television program called Train Time, for which he’s traveled as far as California to film.

The clubhouse is full of train memorabilia and model train layouts representing entire communities, real and imagined. In these miniature worlds, sparkling streams rush down rugged mountains, and factories, houses, farms and churches rise up at the edges of the wilderness.

The attention to detail in the buildings and bridges can make you feel as though you’re seeing them from above in an airplane or, to stay with the slow-travel theme, a hot air balloon. Other accessories flesh out the spectrum of life: cows in the fields, a television news crew filming a snowy landscape from atop an arched bridge.

Later this month, on the weekends directly before and after Thanksgiving, the club is inviting the public to its Mill Street clubhouse to share the magic during an annual event they call ExTRAINaganza. The building will transform into a busy, bustling hub of train transport and holiday cheer, and for those with an active imagination, it’s worth checking out.

Future conductors are welcome to come out and run trains on the club’s tracks, Lodge said. The biggest, a basement-sized monster set-up, isn’t completely decorated yet, but its looping tracks and rising helixes are impressive as is, and club members will be on hand to demonstrate the techniques they’ll use to transform it from a blank canvas of plywood and lumber into a rough representation of Maine’s Great Northern rail line.

Finished or not, the trains will be chugging along anyway. Attendees will “run trains just like the real thing,” Lodge said. They’ll have a dispatcher to send trains out and make sure all the stops get made, he said.

Smaller train layouts will be set up beneath Christmas trees, he said, and at the end of the event the club will raffle them off. Lodge delivers the complete sets to winners himself — trains, buildings and landscaping, all placed on a bed-sized sheet of plywood. “I’ve had kids literally jumping up and down saying ‘The train man is here!’” he said.

Aside from the trains, there will be other activities, including cookie decorating and arts and crafts. Santa plans to make an appearance on Saturday, Nov. 26, the last day, members said.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Lodge said. “There’s something for everybody.”

Ten-year-old Erin Fournier of Auburn, who attended last year’s event along with about 800 other children and adults, described ExTRAINaganza as “awesome.”

Her brother, Isaac, added that it was fun, especially “going fast.”

This year, ExTRAINaganza will be held Saturday to Monday, Nov. 19-21, and Friday, Nov. 25 and Saturday, Nov. 26. The club requests a $3 donation per adult, with children under 12 free. The Great Falls Model Railroad Club is located at 144 Mill St. in New Auburn.

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