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Riverside Railroad Club has special event
By HAROLD GWIN
WARREN
If you didn’t know you were standing only a few feet away, the scene spread in front of you easily could be a mountaintop view of trains running around and through a long valley.
It’s big, but not quite life-size.
It’s the G-scale (for garden-scale) layout of the Riverside Railroad Club which is located beside and behind the SCOPE Center at 220 W. Market St. The club is running a weekend open house that began Saturday and continues from 1 to 5 p.m. today. Admission is $3 for adults and is free for children age 12 and under. Tickets are available at the gate.
The G-scale trains, considerably larger than the indoor variety of model trains, are built for outdoor use, said Mike Zador of Warren, a retired Mathews school district teacher and club president.
“It’s a good hobby — keeps us off the street,” he said.
The layout stretches over an area about 100 feet by 50 feet in a fenced-in section beside the SCOPE Center and an additional 25 by 50 feet behind the building.
It’s got four tracks totaling 1,000 feet, tunnels, a repair roundhouse, a lake, a small town, farm land, a mountain and even an airport. There are a couple of staged train wrecks but, in reality, multiple trains can run on the tracks at one time.
“It’s always a work in progress,” Zador said. “We try to do one major project a year.”
The annual open houses draw between 20 and 30 people a day, primarily kids who want to see the trains, said Allen Jesunas of Parkman, club treasurer and an employee of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Dues are $36 a year, and the club makes its money to keep improving its layout at its annual spaghetti dinner at the SCOPE Center. This year’s dinner is set for Oct. 9, said Horst Klintz, a retired tool-and-die maker and former club president.
The club, founded in 2002, has about 20 members, and at 72, Klintz is one of the elders. The youngest is 4-year-old David McClellan, son of Michael and Jennifer McClellan of Warren.
He has his own G-scale train. It’s an “LGB,” he said. LGB stands for Lehmann Gross Bahn, which means Lehmann Big Railway in German. It’s perhaps the most-popular garden train.
When asked how long he’s liked trains, David responded, “My whole life.”
The same can be said for some of the older club members.
Jesunas, 52, said he was given a model train by his father when he was born in 1957. “I had an American Flyer,” he recalled.
Klintz said he and his brother delivered newspapers growing up in Germany in the early 1950s and saved their tips from customers to buy their first trains, making sure both got an engine and three railroad cars.
Klintz said he still had his until he sold it to another enthusiast last year. It was a Fleischmann, he added.
Some members got the railroad bug a bit later in life.
Zador said he didn’t get interested until he began setting up a train around the family Christmas tree 23 or 24 years ago.
“And then I went off the deep end. Now, there are trains everywhere,” he said, adding that he’s in the process of building his own outdoor layout at his home. It will be as large as the club’s permanent facility at the SCOPE Center, he said.
The club meets at 5 p.m. the second Tuesday of each month at the center.