Len Lednum of Bar Mills Scale Model Works stands in front of the Wharf Street layout in his Buxton business last week. The Lisbon man’s business creates highly detailed scale-model pieces for model railroad enthusiasts all over the world. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland

There is a very simple way to envision what Len Lednum does for a living. 

He takes chunks of the real world and he makes them smaller. 

Much, much smaller. 

The owner and operator of Bar Mills Scale Model Works in Buxton, Lednum and his crew of eight make scenery and set pieces for model train enthusiasts around the world. 

His products might be small, but the business itself is as big as can be — Bar Mills is likely the biggest scale-model operation in the world. Each month, the business is shipping off 20,000 to 30,000 products to model railroaders all over the place, including a few celebrities that might surprise you. 

To get an accurate idea of what Lednum does day in and day out, it helps if you think about your own hometown and all it entails. 

The churches, the feed store, the parks and houses. Think about Main Street and what you would see there; all those people buzzing in and out of the shops and cars moving down the avenues. Imagine the trees, the mailboxes and trash cans and that old hardware store with the faded clapboard. 

If you can imagine it with great detail, so can Lednum.

“Most modelers do this to recreate their childhood neighborhoods,” he says. “Every guy has a time in his life when he was free. He remembers riding his bicycle all over the place. Our customers are willing to pay for this kind of quality, so we want to give them a product as close as possible to what they’re seeing in their minds.” 

One of the many scenes from the Wharf Street layout on display at Bar Mills Scale Model Works in Buxton. The level of detail has attracted buyers including singer-actor Marc Anthony and rocker Rod Stewart. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland

At Bar Mills, Lednum and his workers use CO2 laser machines and 3D printers to create items down to the finest details. Everything you can imagine from any given landscape, Lednum can recreate it. 

Tiny mailboxes and trash cans shoved up against store fronts. Real rubber tires on miniature cars and trucks parked in front of buildings that are appropriately weathered by the years. 

If the painting on a storefront is cracked and peeling in the real world, Lednum will create his miniature cracked and peeling as well. 

What Bar Mills Scale Model Works sells, when you get right down to it, is realism. 

Lednum builds everything at four different scales, including the most popular HO scale, which is 1:87, or 87 times smaller than what you see in the real world. 

“Essentially, we are architects, engineers and designers here,” Lednum says, “but we’re doing it in four different scales. With most of our structures, you could hand our plans to a builder and he could build it full size.” 

Everything Lednum and his people create is crafted meticulously with no detail overlooked. When a model train enthusiast gets to assembling a landscape in his basement, he or she wants that realism. Cheap plastics and shortcuts will not do. 

“Every type of wood you see in the real world,” he says, “I have it here in four different scales.” 

On of the displays at Bar Mills Scale Model Works in Buxton includes billboards, which were what the business first produced under founder Art Fahie. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland

Who needs groupies?

How many people are into model railroading? While exact numbers are elusive, don’t kid yourself. There are a lot of them, and if you were to start asking around, you’d probably find one or two in your own neighborhood. 

Lednum stands before a model train landscape, dubbed Wharf Street, based on a coastal town from the 1910s. Within that landscape is everything you would expect to see in such a cozy place, including a water tower, ships and tugboats floating in the harbor, kids sitting on a wharf, people mingling in front of a shop, a man in a row boat, trucks loading and unloading at a lumberyard . . .

“You’d be surprised by how many folks here in Maine have something just like this in their basements,” Lednum says. “We call ourselves a secret society. Nobody knows that this is what we’re doing in our basements all winter long.”  

At 17 feet, the Wharf Street model is a true marvel. There is so much going on here — just like any city or town in the full-size world — it would take a person a day to examine in all. 

But 17 feet? Pah! That’s really not so much when it comes to model railroads. 

“Many modelers, their whole basement is something like this,” Lednum says, gesturing again toward Wharf Street, “Only it’s more like 40 or 50 feet.” 

The tiny buildings built at Bar Mills Scale Model Works sell for between $60 and $350. That adds up fast if you happen to be trying to recreate the entirety of your old hometown. 

A lot of Lednum’s customers have reached retirement age and find themselves financially comfortable. They can put big money into their models and they do so because it makes them happy. Model towns with a train running through them make for interesting conversation pieces. 

Just ask singer Rod Stewart, who happens to be a Bar Mills Scale Model Works customer. Most of the items he purchases through the company have to be sent to hotels around the world, Lednum says, because Stewart is still touring a lot. 

“He’s 70-something years old now so he doesn’t want to be hanging out with groupies anymore,” Lednum says. “He wants to model and so that’s what he does.” 

Stewart actually builds a lot of his models on his own, including much of a massive model of a U.S. city he unveiled a few years ago. 

What Stewart can’t make on his own, he orders from the pros in tiny Buxton, Maine. 

So does the singer and actor Marc Anthony, for what it’s worth. 

Bar Mills Scale Model Works owner Len Lednum talks about the display showcasing billboards. After Lednum joined the company, it expanded its product line well beyond billboards to include buildings, boats and pretty much all things seen in real life. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland

A brief history

When you pull up to Bar Mills Model Scale Works for the first time, you know instantly that you’re in the right place.

How so? 

The company happens to be housed in what looks like an old-fashioned train station. In a sense, it is. The building is an exact replica of a historic train station that once stood in Strong, Maine. 

Step inside, and that feeling of being in a world of trains is even more pronounced. Here, on every shelf, are products that will someday find their way into someone’s basement train world. 

Here’s a miniature plumbing supply store occupying a shelf above a wee Texaco station with an an antique car sitting at the pumps. Nearby is a miniature city crammed with buildings, most of which feature billboards upon their roofs. 

The billboards, as it happens, are a key part of the Bar Mills Scale Model Works history. 

In 2000, the business was launched by one Art Fahie, a man Lednum refers to as “basically my adopted father.” 

Fahie, by all accounts, is a character. He had tried a few different careers, including carpentry and welding, before teaming up with engineer Jim Mooney to start a business making models.

Lednum, who lives in Lisbon where he serves on the school committee, joined the business in 2001, giving up his regular job as a Subway sandwich artist to work with Fahie.

For Lednum, building miniature worlds for a living was kind of a no-brainer.

“I was into model building, but not the train aspect of it,” he says. “I started with model cars as a kid, and then drifted toward building structure dioramas as a teenager. When offered the job at Bar Mills, it just made sense.”

At the time, the business was manufacturing only miniature billboards for model railroad enthusiasts who had nowhere else to get them. 

“It was kind of like a ‘duh’ moment,” Lednum says. “All these model railroaders are modeling from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and even the ’70s. Billboards were everywhere back then, but no one was making them for model railroading. So we came out with eight of them and then we expanded it.” 

We’re talking scale model billboards that were once strewn across the American landscape: Carter’s Liver Pills, Philco batteries, Moxie, Reddy Kilowatt and A&P Tea Co., to name just a few. 

Another scene from the Wharf Street layout on display at Bar Mills Scale Model Works in Buxton. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland

Look at old photos of these types of billboards and you’ll see that Lednum’s versions are exact replicas scaled down for the model train set. 

And it didn’t take long for the billboards to become popular. 

“By 2005, we were pushing 40,000 of these billboards out the door each month,” Lednum says. “It was insane. It got to the point where we couldn’t keep up with the demand, so we did a kind of last call. All the distributors we deal with, all the hobby stores, they purchased their last orders and then we moved on to making buildings.” 

Customers of the business have come to appreciate the shop in Buxton for providing realism that’s otherwise hard to find, and business continues to boom. 

There was a lull in the years prior to 2020, Lednum says, but then COVID-19 came along and so many people were looking for a new hobby that business took off again, and it hasn’t slowed since. 

Many of his customers are regulars, Lednum says, and there’s a simple reason for that. One may have 60 feet or more of model train landscape in his basement already, but come on. The real world is evolving all the time, so why shouldn’t a miniature version do the same? 

“It’s something we joke about,” he says. “Your layout is never really done. You may think you’re done, but then you look at it and you’re like, ‘Oh, geez. I gotta change that. I gotta replace something.'” 

In all, Lednum has eight employees, with four of them working full time to keep up with demands for their products. Lednum took over as owner of the business in 2024 when Fahie decided to retire. Kind of.

“All these years later Art’s still losing X-Acto knives and gluing his fingers together on a regular basis,” according to the man’s bio, “just illustrating that when you’re around him even model railroading can be a hazardous hobby. After 25 years, Art has hung up his hat and gone fishing!”

Bar Mills Scale Model Works is located in a replica train station in Buxton. The business is a destination, particularly during the summer, for visiting model railroad enthusiasts who want to see where the scenery for their layouts is produced. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Portland

Wanna give it a try?

In the summertime, things can get lively at the replica train station on Towle Street in Buxton. Many of the Bar Mills Scale Model Works customers find themselves vacationing in Maine, you see, and no vacation for a model railroader would be complete without a visit to the place where so much magic happens. 

Lednum himself gives these visitors guided tours, which take two hours or more. 

“And for them, it’s kind of like going to Disneyland,” Lednum says, “because they always leave with smiles . . . and a bunch of products.” 

In the model train world, there are old pros and there are people just getting started. On the Bar Mills Scale Model Works website, there are a whole bunch of instructional videos covering everything from the use of fences, to painting, to how to age and distress wall panels. The company always welcomes people who are new to the hobby.

Bar Mills can send you everything you need to begin making your own miniature world, with the warning that there may be a learning curve to surpass before you gets things just right. One of the key ingredients to model railroading, as it happens, just can’t be bought.

“The only thing we can’t put in the box,” says Lednum, “is patience.”