Page 18 - MLT December

frontline
The Hot Seat
by Lisa Dukart
PAUL HOERNER
MODEL TRAIN SPECIALIST, BRANDYWINE RIVER MUSEUM OF ART
STATS & STUFF
WINTER READS
Curl up with a good book by a local author.
The latest from Chester County’s Lisa Scottoline, Someone Knows (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages) follows a group of adults linked by tragedy in their youth. Expect plenty of familiar scenery.
Wynnewood native
and Lower Merion
grad Jamie Brenner delivers another
page turner in
Drawing Home (Little, Brown, 368 pages). It’s even set
in summer, to give you a break from the chilly air.
The Iron Ring
(William Kingsfield Publishers, 364
pages) adds to
Chester County
novelist Matty Dalrymple’s Lizzy
Ballard thriller series. Vengeance and billionaires are on offer.
Villanova artist
and author George Rothacker’s Singularity 1.0 (Outskirts Press, 300 pages)
takes readers 10 years into the future, where artificial intelligence reigns supreme.
Former Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Jennifer Weiner’s Mrs. Everything (Atria Books,
480 pages) generated a ton
of buzz upon its release earlier this year. In this multigenerational narrative, readers explore the pressures of female perfection.
THE LIST
Every year around the holidays, 1,000 locomotive engines and rolling cars whip around nearly 2,000 feet of track at the Brandywine River Museum of Art’s A Brandywine Christmas. A former train conductor with the Wilmington & Western Railroad, Paul Hoerner began working on the display in 1987, and for the past four years, he and David Jensen have been the only two in charge. You can check out their handiwork from Nov. 29 to Jan. 5, 2020.
MLT: Where does your love of trains come from?
PH: My dad started putting up a train display on Christmas Eve when I [was young]. In the morning when I’d wake up, there’d be trains there, because Santa Claus had come and set them up. It started out as a lifelong passion for trains at Christmas, and that eventually grew into just enjoying real trains and modeling my own displays.
MLT: How’d you become involved in A Brandywine Christmas?
PH: When I was a freshman in college in 1987, a couple friends and I saw a help-wanted ad to set up a museum display right around Thanksgiving, and they happened to be model trains. I’ve been there ever since.
MLT: How do you balance tradition and innovation in the display?
PH: There are definitely beloved scenes that always stick around,
like the dairy farm, Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends and the Herr’s Factory. We always try and have a nod to the past, but we also understand that we have people who come every year. We’ve been adding more lights to buildings and trying to add more animation and buttons you can push. Our museum was the first family- oriented Christmas train display in the area. If we want to stay on the cutting edge, we have to add more.
MLT: How does assembly work? PH: Two weeks before, we’re given an empty gallery to set up our 35-by-61-foot train display. The
first thing we do is put up the backdrop, based on a painting
of the Delaware Valley and the Delaware Water Gap. There are 28 layout sections, most of them five by 10 feet. The next day, we bolt everything together. Then we start putting the track down, the buildings down, the trains down. Every time we add all these new bells and whistles, we need a little extra time to set up.
MLT: What’s your favorite part?
PH: You just see those kids whose eyes light up, and they come running in smiling, laughing and just enjoying themselves. For those 15-30 minutes, they can forget everything else.
Visit www.brandywine.org.
THE HOT SEAT:
TESSA MARIE IMAGES
16 December 2019 | www.mainlinetoday.com