Trip Report · Chattanooga, TN
NMRA Nationals, TVRM, and a Run-In With Southern Railway No. 4501
This past weekend my dad, a couple of friends, and I made the drive from Effingham up to Chattanooga for the NMRA national train show. What started as a trip for the model railroad show floor turned into two full days of trains in every scale, from Lego bricks to full-size steam.
It’s a long haul across Georgia and into Tennessee, but we made the most of it with a stop at the Buc-ee’s in Calhoun on the way up. By the time we rolled into Chattanooga we were more than ready to get out of the car and see some trains. The show and the museum ended up giving us two very different, and equally good, days.
The NMRA show floor itself was bigger than I expected, filling a genuinely massive convention center from end to end. What caught me most was the sheer number of different clubs and organizations that had brought modular layouts, each one built to a shared standard so they could be linked together into one sprawling railroad. Walking from module to module, you could see completely different building styles and scenery themes stitched into a single continuous run. It was a good reminder of how much cooperative engineering goes into a hobby that looks, from the outside, like a solo pastime.
On the Show Floor
One layout in particular stopped us in our tracks, and it wasn’t even a traditional model railroad setup. A group had built an entire scratch-built diorama almost completely out of Lego, down to the trees, the track bed, and rolling stock that looked, at a glance, like injection-molded model railroad pieces. It took a second look to realize none of it was 3D printed or store-bought; it was all built up from bricks. That kind of scratch-built ambition is exactly the part of this hobby that keeps pulling us back to shows like this one.
Scratch-Built in Lego
We spent the second half of that same Saturday at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, which turned into the highlight of the trip. TVRM runs an excursion train out to a working turntable, and we rode it out and back. I’ll be honest, the passenger car seating was tight for a bigger guy like me. I was knee cap to knee cap with the people sitting across from me the whole ride, and it was a hot day in Chattanooga, but the car had working air conditioning, which made the ride a lot more comfortable than it could have been.
TVRM & the Turntable
The real highlight came almost by accident. We were driving around near the museum grounds when we spotted a rail fan standing trackside with a camera, clearly waiting on something. He let us know a train was coming, so we pulled over and waited with him. A few minutes later Southern Railway No. 4501 came through, smoke rolling and whistle blowing, and it was worth every second of standing on the side of the road to see it pass.
“It’s a good thing to let another generation know what a steam locomotive is.”
A Quick History of No. 4501
No. 4501 isn’t just an old engine dressed up for tourists. Built in 1911 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works, it was the very first of Southern Railway’s 2-8-2 “Mikado” type locomotives, and it spent decades hauling freight across the SOU system before dieselization pushed it into retirement in 1948. It bounced to a Kentucky shortline hauling coal, and by 1964 it was headed for scrap.
A railfan named Paul Merriman bought it for $5,000 of his own money that same year and brought it to Chattanooga. Merriman went on to help found the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, and in 1975 he donated No. 4501 to the museum outright. It ran mainline excursions for Southern’s steam program through the 1980s and 90s, was pulled from service when its boiler certificate expired in 1998, and came back fully restored in 2014 with an upgraded feedwater heater and mechanical stoker.
It still runs TVRM’s excursion routes today, and as of this year it’s back in its original Southern Sylvan green and gold paint. Standing trackside watching it go by, it’s hard not to think about how close it came to being cut up for scrap sixty years ago.
No. 4501, Trackside
No. 4501 working the yard, moments after we pulled over trackside.
Photos and video really don’t do it justice, but we got both, and I’m glad we happened to be in the right place at the right time.
A closer look at No. 4501 in its restored Sylvan green livery.
Dinners were Texas Roadhouse Friday night and Mexican food Saturday night, with breakfast at the hotel both mornings before heading out. Nothing fancy, just solid road-trip fuel between stops. The real draw of those meals wasn’t the food, it was the conversation. Trips like this one are as much about the company as they are about the trains, and this one delivered on both fronts.
This post was edited by AI but reviewed by Jarrod to reflect intent.
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