If you count yourself among those who like trains, real ones or replicas, you’ll want to mark your calendar for the upcoming Leader Holiday Shopping Spree on Nov. 10, when members of the Jefferson County and Southern Model Railroad Club show off their HO trains and landscapes depicting the railroads of the Midwest.
The spree will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Quality Inn, 1200 West Gannon Drive, in Festus.
People of all ages are invited, to take advantage of holiday shopping opportunities and to enjoy the train display.
Dave Wehner, vice president of the railroad club, said he knows why people love trains.
“It’s the motion, the power, the excitement to see a train go by and think about where a train could take you,” he said. “People especially like the steam locomotives with all their parts. They are poetry in motion. Everything is moving together with all the smoke and steam.”
Wehner, 63, of Hoene Springs and Bob Miller, 68, who lives south of Festus, are among the 12 active members of the railroad club who will have trains and some of their other handiwork at the shopping spree.
They will take modules – sections of landscape and track they have created – to the event and connect them together, creating a large display.
“Club members build their modules and they are designed so they can travel in a trailer or a truck,” Miller said.
All the modules are 30 inches wide, but the length can vary between 4-feet and 8-feet long.
If all the railroad club members are able to make it to the shopping spree, together they will create a “trainscape” that will be 44 feet long and 28 feet wide he said.
“We have a set of standards so the main lines all match up,” Miller said.
As far as scenery is concerned, club members may build what they want, up to a point. The group has a theme that focuses on eastern woodlands and the type of scenery found in Jefferson and Franklin counties, Miller said.
Wehner said working together with a common theme sets the club apart from others and allows them to have a more unified layout.
In other clubs, he said, the modules could depict any kind of landscape, from desert to coastal.
“They don’t blend,” Wehner said. “People can see different modules but it doesn’t fit together.”
He said the Jefferson County and Southern Model Railroad Club is great for anyone interested in model trains because members share the work, responsibility and cost of the displays by creating their own sections.
Then, there’s the friendship, Wehner said.
“There’s a real camaraderie,” he said. “We all have the same interests and all work together on the same layout.”
Some of the modules represent specific locations, Miller said.
“In my module, I model an old section of the old Festus Depot and Mill Street. It includes a replica of the station with as much detail as I could get from old photographs,” he said. “Our club president, Dennis Kehm, has a module that is a replica of PPG homes in Crystal City along Mississippi Avenue.”
Another module wasn’t based on the railroad through De Soto, but people who see it often say it resembles the railroad town, Miller said.
Wehner said his module features a coal mine, an office building and a loading dock.
“It has tracks off to the side with cars you can load or pretend to load,” he said.
Miller said it’s about authenticity.
“What we try to do is make the scenes look as authentic as possible, with trees, hills valleys and creeks,” he said.
The scenery is made out of plaster and sometimes Styrofoam, Miller said.
He said model railroaders paint “the ground” with brown latex paint and sprinkle ground up rubber foam onto that, sticking it to the wet paint and giving the terrain a course look.
Some railroaders have more drive for authenticity, Miller said, so they apply a “grass fiber” with an electrical charge onto the wet paint. That allows the fibers to stand up and resemble long grass.
Miller said he has created animated scenes. One has a workman with a shovel that turns back and forth. Another has a water fountain that appears to be flowing, and a third scene has a chicken house with chickens that peck the ground.
“It draws people in,” he said. “They are actually fascinated with it.”
Miller said his latest animate scene has lights that turn on and off automatically, and that scene will be part of the display at shopping spree.
He said the model train display will feature a special guest.
“There is going to be a bearded guy on one of those trains,” Miller said.
Miller said he caught train fever when he was about 5 or 6, when his parents gave him a Lionel set.
“I think as a youngster I was just fascinated with trains because I lived near the rail lines,” he said. “As I grew older, I was interested in the history and wanted to learn more about it. It took off from there.”
Miller now wants to share that history.
“Basically, I want to bring a little bit of history to the younger generation, to explain how railroads operated and how important they were then and even today,” he said.
It also was history that sparked Wehner’s fascination with trains.
“I’ve been interested in trains since I was a kid going through East St Louis to see my grandmother in Dupo (Ill.),” he said. “I ran into the club somewhere, and I joined them in 1987.”
Miller also joined the Missouri Pacific Historical Society and will soon travel to Austin, Texas, with other members.
“They will have a lot of little seminars on the depots and branches of MoPac (the Missouri Pacific Railroad),” he said. “We’re also going to take a steam train ride excursion to the Georgetown Railroad yards and have a swap meet. It’s just a bunch of guys who get together and talk about trains.”
Wehner still sometimes travels to Illinois to see the trains.
“There’s a guy in Maryville, Ill., with a 60-by-70 train layout. People can come out and operate it,” he said.
The Jefferson County and Southern Model Railroad Club recently had three more members join, and new members are welcome. For more information on the club, visit the group’s Facebook page.
