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Railroad club happy to expand its reach to wider audience at Trumbull County Fair
Model trains remind Trumbull County Fairgoers of
By Ed Runyan
BAZETTA
Andrew Fitch of Austintown remembers how excited he got when he was a boy growing up in Salem hearing a train coming down the tracks several blocks from his home.
“I’d go watch the trains go by,” he said. “You never knew what would be behind them. It could be semi-trailers, Army tanks, tanker cars.”
When he was about 9, the Mosblack Hobby Shop opened in Salem, and it sold lots of model trains and tracks, along with numerous other types of hobby items.
“I hung out there all the time and worked there after school,” he said.
His interest in trains and model trains continued into adulthood, though he did take some time away from the hobby for quite a few years.
Now 33, Fitch is a trustee with the Riverside Railroad Club of Warren, which has had a permanent model-train display in the back of the Warren SCOPE center on West Market Street since 2002.
But this year, the club is expanding its outreach into the community through the opportunity to set up a temporary model railroad at the Trumbull County Fair.
The 35-foot-by-10-foot layout is in an education building across the midway from the cow barns.
“Our goal is to keep promoting the hobby and get more people involved in it with the portable layout,” Fitch said.
With this being the first year of setting up a portable display, a great deal of work was involved, such as securing the wooden modules on which to build the layout. The local club bought them for $500 from the Northern Ohio Garden Railway Society, then set them up in the Fowler Township home of one of the other trustees.
They spent three weeks working on the layout there, followed by a week at the fairgrounds setting it back up and fine-tuning it.
The train tracks and buildings that were placed around the layout are mostly owned by the club, but many of the model trains belong to the members, who frequently bring trains of their own to the SCOPE location to operate on the permanent layout.
Fitch is especially interested in steam-powered engines and remembers being extremely impressed the first time he saw one of the barrel-shaped, black beasts chugging through Salem when he was young, throwing off heat and steam.
Today, he takes every opportunity to visit locations where steam engines still operate, such as trips he and his wife have taken to Strasburg, Pa., and Cumberland, Md.
Jennifer Novak and James Eberle of Champion took Novak’s four boys through the train display Wednesday in part because her youngest, Gabriel, 3, is a big train fan.
Novak says part of the reason for his interest is the television show “Thomas the Tank Engine,” which features an animated train named Thomas.
Gabriel got to ride a train at Disney World and “builds tracks all over the living room,” his mother said. “This is awesome,” she said of showing the boys the train display at the fair.
The Riverside Train Club will have its next open house from noon to 4 p.m. Sept. 11 at the Warren SCOPE Center. Donations is $3 for adults and free for kids under 12.