South Okanagan model train tourist attraction scores big on TripAdvisor

OSOYOOS – The accolades keep coming for a small family owned and operated tourist attraction in the South Okanagan.

Poul Pedersen of the Osoyoos Desert Model Railroad says his tourist attraction recently received further recognition from TripAdvisor with a Certificate of Excellence Hall of Fame designation.

TripAdvisor is an American-based travel and restaurant website company that provides reviews of hotels, restaurants, attractions and other travel related content.

Pedersen says the railroad has been awarded a certificate of excellence for the past eight or nine years, and has received a five-star rating every year for the last five, based on feedback received by TripAdvisor.

“It’s based on the number of reviews an attraction receives, good versus bad. If the good reviews exceed 80 per cent of reviews, it’s worthy of five star status,” Pedersen explains.

The Hall of Fame recognition comes about as a result of the railroad’s consistent annual placement in the Certificate of Excellence listing.

“It’s all customer dependent,” Pedersen says.

The model railroad, located at 11611 115 St. in Osoyoos, consists of a Marklin model train layout in a European-style landscape. The display takes up 4,000 square feet and depicts hundreds of different scenes in painstaking detail.

Pedersen says the railroad attraction is in TripAdvisor’s top 30 list of attractions in Canada, and is 25 out of 3,200 attractions listed in British Columbia.

He says this year’s start to the tourist season has been “soft" compared to the previous two seasons, possibly because of the additional publicity given it when it appeared on “The Amazing Race Canada” television show in 2015.

“That was a big boost for us,” he says.

“It’s absolutely quite amazing this small family company in a small town like Osoyoos has attracted so much attention,” he says of the operation, which started as a hobby 50 years ago, before Pedersen turned it into a business 15 years ago.

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