You could be forgiven if you didn’t recognize the geography of the rail lines in and around Bradford, but the little neon Zippo sign is a dead giveaway.

There’s a little bit of Bradford in a Hickory, N.C., home where Nathan Wike has been, for the last three years, building a model railroad of the McKean County area.

“It’s still not finished but it looks really good,” Wike said of his creation. “We’re modeling the refinery area as well as the main line to Mount Jewett” on the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad.

“I’ve been into trains since I was like … I mean, forever,” Wike declared. “I wanted to create something fun and thought the Bradford area would be really fun to model because of all the industry.

“I come up pretty often. I love to (photograph) trains up there; it’s an area that’s special to me.”

Wike, 15, is the grandson of Nancy Bess of Bradford.

Bess laughed, “He told me, ‘Grandma, I sure hope nothing ever happens to you, but we’d still come up here.”

While some model railroad makers are painstakingly precise, Wike said his work is “realistic but at the same time ‘loosely modeled.’ It’s not an exact model of Bradford.

“We had a neon Zippo sign made that lights up — that’s a really good addition. You can tell it’s Bradford when you see the big Zippo sign lit up. When we get the refinery built it will really resemble Bradford and I think the Mount Jewett scene is well done.”

Working on the project allows Wike to spend time with his friends and his mom helps out from time to time as well.

Wike explained he starts with wooden tables and places a layer of foam on top. Cutting into the foam creates the rivers and builds up the mountains. Cork builds the road beds and rail grades.

“Then it’s adding scenery — roads, trees and grass,” Wike said. “At the very end you add your houses and buildings and stuff like that.”

He noted, “The Buffalo & Pittsburgh, as a short line railroad, a smaller carrier, they didn’t make as many models. A lot have to be custom made, so they are super rare models that you wouldn’t see anywhere else — locomotives and the cars themselves.”

A lifelong enthusiast, Wike has seen a lot of trains.

“A normal person has about 1,000 photos on their phone after a year. I think I’ve got 16,000 pictures on my phone and I think 3/5 of those are train pictures and videos.”

A photograph Wike snapped of the Norfolk Southern line in Old Fort, N.C., came in third place in the carrier’s calendar contest among 1,600 submissions.

“That line is famous for the Old Fort Loops,” Wike said of an engineered series of curves, loops and bridges used to circumvent a grade too steep for a train to climb. “It’s crazy to think how you can get that much mass and weight up a mountain without going straight up it.

“The driver can actually look down and see the back of his own train below him.”

Another steep grade — the steepest on the East Coast, in fact — is the main line over Keating Summit that stretches between Liberty and Emporium, Wike said.

“The biggest thing that I like about this hobby is seeing places I would never know about — Keating Summit or Port Allegany — I would never know about those places without knowing the railroad,” Wike shared. “We just got back on a trip from Mississippi and Louisiana and all those tiny towns we went to we would never get to without the railroad interest.”

On his excursions, Wike creates videos for his YouTube page, Blue Ridge Rails, and often shares the history of the small towns those rails pass through.

As far as making a career of trains, Wike said he might rather follow in his father’s footsteps and run his own business.

“People I’ve talked to said working in the railroad cures your interest. I’d rather work somewhere else than lose interest in the railroad.”