LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - The circus calliope began playing at lunchtime, the sound seeming to carry across the parking lot and out to the rest of Strasburg, as Tom Persell gazed upon the small-but-special world of his circus. They were all there, and you could almost feel the excitement of a circus coming to town start to swirl.


The big top. The main entrance, an animal tent and a dressing area for the performers, ranging from a strong man to one who looks a lot like Humphrey Bogart.

"Every tent was put in by hand," Persell said Tuesday inside the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, looking down at his own 16-by-40-foot world of a circus from days gone by.

"I have a half-inch foam insulation board underneath, and I cover it with felt, to give it a realistic look," the Massillon, Ohio, man said as he looked at his model, which he built over several years and has spent three days setting it up.

"And every standing figure is pinned, so wherever I stick these guys, that's where they stay."

Persell is told how amazing his display is, and he smiles. "Everybody keeps telling me that, but I keep looking around and seeing all these other guys in here, too," he said, pointing around the cavernous train museum.

The sprawling complex outside of Strasburg this week has been transformed into a world of amazingly detailed circus miniatures from model builders across the U.S.

Today through Saturday, members of Circus Model Builders International are gathering here for their group's annual convention.

And the rail museum is a natural place for all of the craftsmanship of the circus model builders - after all, railroads were the form of travel for circuses in years gone by, when the visit from a circus was a highlight for any small town.

Persell has built most of his model over the last five years, basing his work on more than 300 books on the old circus.

"Plus, I've been following the circus ever since I was a kid," he said, echoing a theme repeated by many Tuesday as they set up for this week's display.

Said the railroad museum's David Dunn, "We are basically hosting it because railroads were the way all the circuses and carnivals traveled in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"There wasn't any other way to get the tents and the animals and the passengers from Point A to Point B," and special cars were needed to transport the circus, said Dunn, the museum director.

"It was a really big business for the railroads to host the circuses," and it was a big deal for the towns, too, he said. "It was a chance to see rare and exotic animals out in the middle of nowhere ... and it was the only time they got to see an outside act and the animals that came with it."

A local member of both the museum and the model builders group, Tom Shay, of Lancaster Township, said circuses have been part of his life since his dad took him to see the Ringling Brothers circus here.

That was back in 1955, when he was 5, "and that was the last year they were ever in Lancaster ... I saw the elephants going out the Harrisburg Pike."

Hooked on the circus, he started building circus models in high school, and has done other things over the years like dress up as a circus clown and a gorilla and do a circus magic act.

This week's convention also is a chance to showcase the early history of the circus, along with those who worked in it back in its early days, said one circus historian, Robert Houston, of Philadelphia.

Houston wants his display "to show the history of the circus in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia," and the too-often forgotten contributions "of people of African descent in the circus, too," Houston said.

He likes to joke that he got interested in the circus when, as an infant, an elephant roared, his mother dropped him, "I landed on my head on top of a circus program, and I've been circus-simple ever since!

"It's a good story, and I don't tell that to everybody," he said, smiling.

Lancaster's Shay also pointed out that Lancaster once served as winter quarters for the old Welsh Brothers Circus from the 1890s to 1915, using a site on Nevin Street that's now a parking lot for Sacred Heart Church.

Houston said the first circus in America was in Philadelphia in 1793, with George Washington himself as one of the first spectators.