Saginaw Club's 43rd Annual Model Train Sale Returns to Bay City in March

The Saginaw River Valley Model Railroad Club, Michigan's oldest modular model railroad club and officially established as a nonprofit in 1978, brought the 43rd Annual Mid Michigan Model Train Sale back to Bay City on March 22 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Bay City – Riverfront. The one-day event ran from 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM and featured over 120 vendor tables, operating layouts, raffle prizes, and exclusive vendor giveaways.

Free parking, on-site hotel access, and early entry options rounded out the logistics for what the club bills as one of Michigan's biggest model train events of the year. Admission ran $10 for adults, with children 12 and under getting in free.

The centerpiece, as always, was SRV's HO scale modular layout. In HO (1:87 scale), the club's setup expands up to 90 feet by 65 feet and runs two main lines plus a branch line, with what the club describes as many scale miles of sidings, industries, and switching opportunities. The layout changes configuration at every event, which means even regulars who've been coming for years won't see the same railroad twice.

The scene variety inside that footprint is worth cataloguing on its own. The club's modules include an operating drive-in movie theatre, a brewery, a zoo, a circus, an operating container facility, a rail yard and engine facility, a working drawbridge and swing bridge, a river canyon, a gravel pit, and a trailer park, among others. On the motive power side, the roster spans early steam through modern diesel, European bullet trains, and Thomas the Tank Engine. Visitors have been known to bring their own engines and ask SRV members to run them on the layout alongside the club's fleet of more than 200 freight and passenger cars.

The club has been bringing the wonder of railroading to families across Michigan and Ohio since the early 1960s, and its first public display in March 1979 set the template for the annual sale that has now run 43 consecutive editions. That kind of institutional staying power is rare in club-level model railroading, and it shows in the production value SRV brings to Bay City each spring.

The 2025 edition of the sale was held at the Comfort Inn and Suites and Conference Center in Mount Pleasant, making the 2026 return to Bay City's Riverfront DoubleTree a venue change worth noting for anyone who mapped last year's trip. The DoubleTree location on the Saginaw River puts the show in a waterfront hotel with ample space to accommodate a layout of this scale alongside more than 120 tables of dealers moving locomotives, rolling stock, scenery materials, track, and vintage pieces.

For a show now in its fifth decade, the Mid Michigan Model Train Sale remains one of the more serious buying opportunities on the Michigan calendar, and SRV's layout alone justifies the $10 ticket even before you start working the tables.