Mall railroad reaches end of tracks

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (wOOD) - Model trains run on tracks that lead nowhere -- except in the imaginations of little boys like Isaac Henion and his brother Jackson.

Or in the memory of 85-year-old Beatrice Dalman.

"It brings back memories, at least for me, from olden days, from when I was young," she said on Monday.

For almost 25 years from Thanksgiving to the New Year the model trains, many of them made in nearby Delton, have run at the center of Breton Village Mall through a 600-square-foot scale-model countryside. It's a holiday tradition.

One of the trains alone travels almost 1,000 miles during the holidays -- past Frederic J. Harvey Steakhouse, John's Hardware, First National Bank and the Sinclair Service Station -- over and over and over.

But on Jan. 11, the train will reach the end of the tracks.

Since before 1990, Herb DeVries, 79, and his wife Shirley, 80,  have put this together with family and friends. "It's a labor of love," he said.

But, he said, they're getting too tired to continue. The set takes three weeks each year to put it up, even with lots of help, and they're called almost daily when something goes wrong. Derailments aren't uncommon.

"If there's a derailment, we get a call," he said.

"It's going to be hard, but there just comes a time when it's too much, physically," he said. "It's just time to give it up."

Heidi Henion and her husband Ron of Middleville brought their two sons to the mall on Monday after learning about the plans.

"There goes Thomas," Isaac, 3, said as Thomas the Tank Engine chugged by.

"My boys love trains -- everything trains," Heidi Henion said. "We thought we'd come and show it to them before it came down. I wish it would stay. Obviously, my kids would love to see it every year. We're sad that it's coming down, but we're glad we were able to see it one last time."

"That's what makes it hard to give up," DeVries said of the children.

What makes it even more difficult is that the hundreds of visitors who have signed the guest book, many of them asking that the train set stay.

Among the supporters was former state senator Bill Hardiman and former U.S. Congressman Vern Ehlers.

"It's sad," Beatrice Dalman said. "All that work he's done for these years that it can't be preserved. It really belongs in a museum somewhere."