Our #March newsletter blooms with fun things to do! Spring into St. Patrick’s Day fun, festivals, museum exhibits, sightseeing, wine tasting, dining and more! https://buff.ly/2ThvZPe
Attractions
Cathy Hendrie
PassPort to San Diego
Engineer a day devoted to miniature heaven at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park. Both San Diego locals and out-of-towners love this impressive venue, which spans 27,000 square feet of space in the lower level of the Casa De Balboa building.
The museum features six bustling train exhibits and an unparalleled attention to detail that has to be seen to appreciated. Chug along and be transported to real and imaginary railway lines with weathered and modern trains running through them.
The main exhibit loops you around fascinating displays featuring various O, HO and N scale exhibits. The large dioramas are completely landscaped to represent actual railway scenarios found in California and Arizona. Tiny towns, figurines, vintage vehicles, a carnival, trestle bridges over huge gorges, mountains and deserts, grazing lands, are all constructed with fine detail and accuracy.
A fifth operating display devoted to rare and modern toy trains is for the child in each of us. The Toy Train Gallery is a nostalgic trip for visitors remembering Lionel Type trains and the cute lighted villages set up at Christmas time, and a delight to little ones discovering the Lionel trains for the first time.
Outside the back door, find the newest exhibit, a small fenced-in garden called the Centennial Garden Railway. It is dedicated to the electric street car lines designed for transporting the masses who visited the San Diego for the Panama-California Exposition in 1915. The miniature street cars run past scale models of some of the original buildings like the Balboa Park’s famous Spreckels Organ Pavilion and the California Tower.
A labor of love, the San Diego Model Railroad Museum is operated and maintained largely by volunteers, and a must see for rail fans. General admission tickets include access to all indoor and outdoor exhibits and daily programs. On the first Tuesday of each month, show proof you are a San Diego County resident, and enjoy free admission!
The museum is open from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Call (619) 696-0199 or visit the museum online.
A Wells-Fargo stagecoach, Wyatt Earp’s signature and the story of Bum the town dog make for fascinating fun at the San Diego History Center, located in the heart of Balboa Park. The 1866 stagecoach could travel from San Diego to Los Angeles in just two days. Gambler Wyatt Earp had business dealings in San Diego properties and bet on prizefights and horse racing. Bum the St. Bernard/spaniel arrived in the city as a stowaway on a late-1800s steam ship and decided to stay.
But the birth of “America’s Finest City” and surrounding areas begins centuries earlier with the Kumeyaay culture, followed by 18-century Spanish settlements, the 19th-century Mexican era and California Gold Rush.
Luckily for visitors, the History Center chronicles it all, through a variety of mediums and subjects, including art, photographs, documents, historic clothing and objects.
Along with the area’s aforementioned indigenous beginnings exhibited in “Place of Promise,” the center also illustrates the initial development and transformation of today’s downtown beginning in the 1870s, when Alonzo Horton built his wharf at the foot of 5th Avenue, to the 1985 opening of Horton Plaza in the newly designed historic district, The Gaslamp Quarter.
For visitors researching the city, the center carries 2.5 million historic photographs and 45 million documents to view in the lower-level library and archives. The center also offers a many popular programs for kids and adults. An 80-seat Thornton Theatre shows exhibit-related films and is also available for rent for corporate meetings, movies and lectures. The center may also be rented for weddings and other occasions.
Museum hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. The center offers free admission for San Diego residents on the second Tuesday of each month. Stop in for a lesson in the region’s dynamic past! For more information, call (619) 232-6203 or visit sandiegohistory.org/.