Behind a door labeled "Experimental Alchemy" Dave Jamriska is building another world. "All this exists in my mind," the retired Los Alamos Laboratory chemist said, sweeping his hand over the tiny trees, the tiny men in mid-stride, the tiny aliens struggling from their saucer-sized spaceship plunged into the plaster earth.

"I just wanted to build it," Jamriska went on, flicking the switch on his control and snaking his model train up into a snow-flecked mountain dotted with skiers the size of chocolate chips. He smiled like a 12-year-old, as if the mountain were a mound of ice cream.

Jamriska is one of 50 members of the Santa Fe Model Railroad Club. Each weekend in November the club's members will be opening up their models to the public in celebration of National Model Railroad Month. A wide variety of model layouts, ranging both in scale and in historical source, will be on display in the garages, barns, and studios of members' homes.

This is the club's third consecutive year hosting the event, and they expect an even better turnout than before, said Mark Kellermen, one of the club's longest-running members. "We've really grown rapidly in the last four or five years," he said, doubling a membership that hardly grew in the club's previous 15 years of existence.

The club's membership does not drastically upend the stereotype of model railroaders as retired white males, but Kellermen attributed both the open house weekends and the club's annual Christmas model in the lobby of the Plaza's First National Bank to bringing in half a dozen women members and even a few kids, one as young as 9.

"The purpose of the open house weekends are to share our love of model trains with the public," Dick Rotto, the club's president, declared as he fired up his basement rendition of the Trinidad-Raton rail line, the lights on the panel flashing and beeping like a missile was about to streak out from his underground lair. "The enjoyment that parents and kids get out of our models is gratifying," he said.

The wide variety of disciplines involved in creating both proportionally scaled and historically accurate railroads accounts for much of the devotion modelers feel for their creations. Historians, electricians, engineers, carpenters and artists could all put their skills to use building these minor worlds. Most modelers end up learning a bit of everything. "I've learned skills I never thought I wanted to know," Rotto said.

Many members have sentimental connections to the models they build. Chuck Cover, the organizer of the open house month, relocated to Santa Fe from Pennsylvania. In his artist's studio-turned miniature railyard, Cover has spent three years, and plans to spend ten more, building a re-creation of the Shamokin rail line that supplied iron ore to Western Pennsylvania's innumerable steel mills.

Cover's grandfather was an inspector for the Pennsylvania Railroad. As a child, his father bought him model trains for Christmas. "In high school and college, fast cars and girls are more important than model railroads," Cover said. "I picked it up again after I was married. It takes me back to when I grew up. A lot of guys model things that remind them of the good times in their lives."

Rotto hopes that more youth will become involved and "catch the bug" of model railroad building. It's kids, he said, big or small, that love the trains most of all. "Whenever my neighbors have grandkids in town, you can be sure I'll get a call," he said.

A complete schedule of the Santa Fe Model Railroad Club's open house weekends, including maps and directions, is available on their Web site at santafemodelrailroadclub.org/default.aspx.