John Ruh of Edgebrook, Ill., has turned his basement into a miniature display of Route 66. And it sounds like no detail is spared.
Ruh’s Route 66 begins, as the real one did, in Chicago with a facade of the Art Institute. It continues through Illinois farmland–with a green plastic doormat modified to appear like even rows of corn. The road goes by the Skyview Drive-in Theater in Litchfield, Ill., where toy cars line up before a tiny television screen showing a Route 66 documentary. …
It continues over the Chain of Rocks Bridge to St. Louis and the Gateway Arch, through Kansas, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, home to tiny versions of the Cadillac Ranch and Amarillo’s Big Texan restaurant, where anyone who eats a 72-ounce steak in an hour gets it free. Then it’s on to New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest in Arizona and all the way to the Santa Monica Pier, jutting out to the Pacific Ocean. …
No detail is too precise–from the furnace that has been decorated to look like a Texas oil refinery to the audio recording of a train conductor barking out “All aboard!” above the ambient noise of bustling Union Station.
Ruh does open his house for visitors. Route 66 tour operator John Weiss visited it recently. Unfortunately, the report doesn’t include any photographs.