Peninsula In Passage

Trainland Mike’s Trainland and the Lancaster Train and Old Toy Museum charmed children and adults from 1979 until 1998. Mike Twiford and Junie Lancaster drew them all to Bennett’s Creek with a collection of trains and toys that earned the shop a national reputation – and an interstate highway sign. Twiford was a teenager when he helped A. J. “Junie” Lancaster start the train, toy and hobby shop in 1968 at Lancaster’s Coleman’s Nursery in Churchland. Just 11 years later Twiford bought the Trainland business. In the early 1980s Trainland outgrew the garden center location and moved to Bennett’s Creek. When a 1982 fire severely damaged Coleman’s Nursery, Lancaster moved his vast personal collection of trains and vintage toys to Trainland to create the museum. “Junie and I partnered in the venture and pulled people in on a nostalgia trip,” Twiford said. “We tried to offer wholesome family entertainment and had a remote control race track in front of the store.”

Lancaster dreamed of a big train layout but by 1992 his battle with Parkinson’s disease was taking its toll. Twiford worked with the South East Virginia Live Steamers, Inc. to create Lancaster’s dream - the Lancaster Short Line, a ride-on garden train that looped around a 1/8 mile landscaped circuit next to Trainland. “It was their labor and Junie’s money,” Twiford said. The first locomotive, a worn amusement ride from the Eastern Shore, was refurbished by the Live Steamers. Silver, detailed with red and yellow, the diesel locomotive recalled the 1940s Santa Fe Chief. After 200 people showed up for the initial run. Hundreds more continued to come to ride the train. After Lancaster’s death in February, 1996, his collection of toys and trains were given to the Children’s Museum of Virginia in downtown Portsmouth. The loss of the museum and intense competition from the Internet forced Twiford to close Trainland in 1998. “There is a season for everything and I fell back on the nursery,” says Twiford, now Vice President of Purchasing at Bennett’s Creek Nursery, adjacent to where Trainland once stood. Skip Novak is the exhibit and train curator of Lancaster Antique Toy and Train collection at the Children’s Museum of Virginia and designed the layout on which many of Junie Lancaster’s trains run. The vast layout highlights three cities – Roanoke, Richmond and Portsmouth and is a visitor favorite. “We have people come from all over the world to see these unique trains,” Novak says. “Junie’s gift of the trains came just in time for phase two of the museum and they’re a huge draw.”

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