For Love of Trains
Volunteers keep the trains running at Edgerton Model Railroad Club. The Rochester club celebrates 75 years this year
By Mike Costanza
Lee Wood has loved model locomotives and rail cars since he received his first Lionel train.
“I’ve still got my locomotive, the original one that I had — and it does run,” said the curator of the Edgerton Model Railroad Club.
Now the 78-year-old and the other members of the EMRC keep the model trains running at Rochester’s Edgerton R-Center.
This past October, the club celebrated the 75th anniversary of the opening of the large displays of H-O scale trains and tracks. Each of the four layouts shows a part of Rochester or Monroe County during a different season of the year.
“It celebrates Upstate, Rochester and Monroe County in 1950,” said Michael Nolan, the EMRC’s 80-year-old president. “It’s like a little time machine.”
Visitors can watch trains pass by the Hylan Airport in Henrietta, through models of downtown Rochester and the Port of Rochester and through a winter scene that has twinkling lights, Christmas trees for sale and a tiny Santa on hand to welcome them. There’s even a subway line running beneath the surface of one layout.
Many of the buildings and other items shown disappeared long ago — Rochester’s subway line is long gone and the airport is now Marketplace Mall — but the exciting displays capture the past in a way that draws the eye. The layouts have even gained attention outside the Rochester area. Classic Toy Trains, a magazine for the lovers of toy trains, was planning to publish their history in October.
According to a history of the EMRC, the layouts were the brainchild of the late Rochester Police Department Capt. Henry H. Jensen. Jensen, who was also the director of the Rochester Youth Bureau and the Police Athletic League, thought model trains might give local kids a chance for wholesome recreation.
Jensen contacted the late Arthur M. Raphael, the executive vice president of the Lionel Corporation, which makes model trains and equipment. Lionel donated all the trains and accessories for the project. City of Rochester carpenters built a large room for it at the recreation center and volunteers pitched in to build the displays.
“It was built in the center from 1949 to 1950 by many groups, including RIT art students,” Nolan said.
New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey cut the ribbon on what was then called “P.A.L Model Railroad Heaven” on Oct. 27, 1950. The P.A.L. eventually turned the layouts over to the city.
Down through the years, EMRC members have maintained and upgraded the recreation center’s layouts and showed them to the public, even though the club itself disbanded and reformed twice. During the latest renovation, the train room received a new floor and parts of the displays were repainted and rewired. Each layout has several thousand feet of wiring.
“We wanted it to be interactive,” Nolan said. “Each layout has about a dozen buttons that you can push and watch things operate, because kids like to push buttons.”
The current edition of the club, which formed in 2009, has as many as 29 members. Though about half of them are older than 50, some are younger than 16. Those who work on the displays or present them to the public do so for free because of their love of model trains.
Mark Houck, who works full time as an electronics technician for a local firm, came to the train room recently to put some time in on one of the layouts.
“I like to play with things and trains are dear to my heart,” the 65-year-old Rochester resident said. “It just brings back the kid in me.”
As Houck spoke, he applied a coat of paint to a model of the Genesee River.
“We’re not scale modelers here, but we like to bring realism into the figure and provide something for everyone all ages to enjoy. That’s why we have different accessories like the press buttons or something of history,” he said.
When not in the train room, Houck enjoys working on his own model train layout, which fills about 126 square feet of his basement. He also likes real trains but said “they’re kind of hard to put in your basement.”
Though Nolan volunteers in the train room and works full time as an English professor at Monroe Community College, he still finds the time to enjoy his collection of model trains. His four-season H-O layout takes up two-thirds of his basement and includes 7-foot-high mountains. Step into the center of the display and you’re surrounded by trains.
“As you stand in that area, you’re like in a miniature world,” he said.
He also has made two other layouts, including one in the tiny N scale that fits into a briefcase.
“You can put the locomotive on one of your big fingers,” he said.
As EMRC’s curator, Wood oversees the train room’s operations and makes sure its layouts are maintained properly. He gained his love of model trains as a kid living in East Rochester, where the now-defunct Merchant’s Despatch Transportation Co. made rail cars.
“I grew up with trains all the time,” he said.
He developed a love for model trains, turned away from the hobby as a teenager, then returned to it as an adult.
“Once you got old enough, you were able to afford the trains you wanted as a kid,” he said.
Wood’s duties as club curator don’t stop him from working on the Edgerton R-Center’s layouts.
“I love working with all that stuff,” he said.
For more information, go to: edgertonmodelrailroadclub.com