While skyscrapers tower over New Yorkers on a daily basis, at the New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show it’s the people that tower over the New York skyline.

Skyscrapers, townhouses, mansions, museums, and statuesque bridges stretch across 6,000 square feet of space in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Landscaped waterfalls, rivers, rocks, and grass fill in the gaps. The show contains about 135 historic, landmark buildings and other famous sites in New York City and along the Hudson Valley, with 12 different trains and trolley lines running among them. The models are made with almost completely organic materials such as bark, leaves, twigs, stones, and berries. There is one nonnatural material: To preserve the models, they are soaked in eurothane upon completion.

The train show has been running since 1992 and there are new, more elaborate and detailed additions made to the exhibit every year. This year, the main addition is a unique rendition of Yankee Stadium in 1923 complete with an internal design and a motion detector that sets off sound clips of historical Yankee events.

The models can take Paul Busse and his company, Applied Imagination, anywhere from 40 to 300 hours to complete. The island centerpiece contains most of the tallest and best-known buildings in New York – the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central, City Hall, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Radio City Music Hall, the Statue of Liberty, and even a model of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.

There are 1,000 feet of train tracks.

It takes eight to nine days for Mr. Busse and his team, along with extra helpers, to set up the entire exhibit. Every year, the landscaping of the buildings and bridges is rearranged. There are rarely blueprints for how the show will be set up. “It’s a very creative process right on the spot,” Mr. Busse explained. “We never want it to look like it did before. This year we put all the buildings from the Hudson Valley around the outer wall of the conservatory – that forced us to put everything else in a different way.”

Although Mr. Busse has been able to see only about half of the buildings and sites in person, he is very concerned with the artistic interpretation of the way the building feels than with the appropriate scale.” We focus much more on the artistic, creative flow for the visual entertainment as opposed to being historically correct,” Mr. Busse said.” We love to trigger stories or memories.”

The renditions of four of the city’s most spectacular bridges usually draw the most attention. The Brooklyn, Manhattan, Hell Gate, and High Bridges even have trains running across them. Peter Tremblay of Manhattan, who attended the show, said the Brooklyn Bridge was his favorite piece because of the way the space was engineered in creating it.

The piece Mr. Busse is most proud of is St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “It’s really a breathtaking building in its own right and the model really feels like the real thing,” he said.Although there is no explicit statement of the show’s general concept, many viewers are aware of the attempt to create a balance between nature and man.

“The point is you have what man made and what nature made – it shows that we are compatible,” a New Jersey resident who is a member of the Gardens, Lorraine Forgus, said.

Moreover, for people who don’t have time to see all the real historical landmarks, the show is a way for them to get a taste of New York City and the surrounding area. “I’ll never see these sights in real life,” Ms. Forgus said, “and I’m getting to see them here.”

While many adults at the train show were struck most with the buildings and site models, a majority of the children were more fascinated with the trains. Mr. Busse and his team use gardengauge trains to run through the show because they can get wet and still function.

Last year, the show brought in more than 150,000 viewers. Last weekend, more than 15,000 people came to see the show, including Joe Torre, the Yankees manager. While the New York show may be the most well known, Mr. Busse works on many others, including a permanent show in New Orleans that miraculously survived the hurricane.

This year’s show runs until January 8. As for what viewers can expect for next year, Mr. Busse is already thinking about adding more layers to the exhibit by having more levels of trains, something he said will remind him of the layers that he sees while driving down the West Side Highway. “New York is so intense with layers and layers of buildings and I really would like to create that,” Mr. Busse said. He also said he would like to add a scene from Greenwich Village or Chinatown. Mr. Busse noted, though, “I’ll never live long enough to do all the things I want for New York.”