It contains a coal fueling tower, pipe yard, roundhouse, meatpacking plant, maintenance department, holding yard and more. To the south, there is a farm and industrial sites. On the north side of the room, the landscape depicts a small southern railway town with a carnival, car wash, scrapyard, church, haunted house, memorial garden, Main Street, town park, gas station and more. The outside loop (mainline 1), journeys around the entire landscape, and the inside loop (mainline 2), goes through the freight yards.

He has both steam and diesel engine trains. The “O” gauge trains run on two main lines spanning 228 feet each. He pays homage to his hometown with a sign in his train town that says ‘Noel City Park.’ We can’t afford to burn this house down.” So he did. His mother put it out, but when they moved to Gravette, AR, she said, “You have to sell that bull you’re raising, and buy yourself a train. Trying to make his Marx toy train smoke like a Lionel, he put some of his mother’s cotton wool in the tinder box. His first Lionel train set was the product of an accident in his home on the farm in Noel, MO. The attention to detail and making each piece to scale creates a display that is both realistic and mesmerizing. The train room is built into the house, and it took 22 years to get the layout and details as they are now. He and his wife Joyce moved to Dover in 1993, into a home she designed with his trains in mind.

Marion has amassed 50 train sets, all of which either ride the two main lines on his model railway or are displayed nearby. Marion Helton is a self-proclaimed “train nut.” From his first train ride on the Kansas City Southern line when he was five years old and his first Lionel train set at age 12, his love of trains and his train-set collection grew through the years.

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