Depending on the time of day, if you drive along Foxhall, Flatbush or any of the other six or seven streets in Midtown where the rails of an at-grade railroad crossing slices through the city, it’s possible that the red lights above a crossbuck will set to flashing, the striped crossing gates will lower themselves down, and that’s a row of drivers stuck to contemplate just how fast and large a CSX freight train can be.
Each standard CSX 50’ boxcar rolling by, for instance, can carry up to 200,000 lbs. Attach enough of these together and the interruption to a driver’s commute can stretch a mile or two long- with the back of the train suspended on the trestle in the air over the Rondout Creek at the same time the front of the train is passing through St. Mary’s Cemetery.
Eventually though the train passes, the gates go up, the lights stop flashing and the cars drive on. But for some human beings the impression made by a passing train remains, intensifies and then it is that contemplating trains becomes a full-blown passion. To satisfy the urge more conveniently all that’s required is to scale the experience down to model trains set running on a track through a model town arranged on a piece of plywood, covered in fake grass, decorated with hills and trees.
Many such recreations were on display on Sunday March 24 at the model train and railroad hobby show which once again rolled in to the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center in Midtown Kingston.
Festive balloons, vinyl signs and sandwich board signs set out on the sidewalk pointed the way and billed the happening as the largest train show in Ulster County. From babbling toddlers to grey beards with canes, enthusiasts of all ages are milling about inside. The neighborhood community center’s parking lot was packed, with attendees parked cars spilling out along Broadway Avenue.
Inside there’s a railroad related cacophony in the air, reminiscent of the crazy non-stop bells and whistles inside a casino, but here it’s the model trains making their circuit, the distinctive choo-choo sound of a steam engine locomotives and plaintive steam whistles which never let up.
Kingston-born Matt Savatgy has shared the duties of organizing the event with his brother going back 13 years now. He estimates that the once-a-year, one-day, all-things-locomotive extravaganza lures in between twelve to fifteen hundred people.
“You got your really serious, older train building hobbyist,” says Savatgy, “and then we’ve got a lot of young families who are just really excited about trains in general. Thomas the Tank Engine, that sort of thing.”
The show isn’t affiliated with the Kingston Model Railroad Club, which has its modestly sized headquarters over by the YMCA, with a permanently flashing red signal light. They’ve got a table set up though.
“There’s probably 10 different train clubs and model railroad related non- profits here,” Savatgy says, “ including Catskill Mountain Railroad, they do train rides to Kingston Plaza there.”
“It may look like a toy, but it’s not,” says James Robert Harrington, member of the Old Newburgh Model Railroad Club of Walden New York, pointing at the model trains running on some tracks.
Harrington identifies a New York Central Hudson coal powered locomotive trundling along as well as a replica of a diesel powered New York Ontario and Western train, a company at one time headquartered in Middletown.
“When the first model train came out. It wasn’t intended to be a toy. It was just used for sometimes display for holidays like Christmas.”
Of course when the trains first materialized on their rails in the middle 1700’s America, they were emblematic of the industrial revolution and heralded a new process using coal to melt steel. One consequence of their invention was an outmoding of waterway shipping for commodities and goods. If a train company built rails next to a city, it was a financial boon for the city. If they built the rails somewhere else, the redirected commerce could likewise be the death of the city. And it was that commerce drained from the waterways.
“Take the Delaware and Hudson Railroad,” says Harrington. “They used to move the coal from the anthracite area, around Scranton, Pennsylvania, to port Jervis. And over to the Hudson River. Before the coal was moved along the D & H Canal. Delaware and Hudson railroad basically took over what the canals did. So once the train was here, and that was it for the canals.”
Port Jervis in fact used to be a port for the canal barges along the canal. No more.
“What brought the downfall for the railways was airplanes and trucks on the interstate highways,” says Matthew Svoboda, colleague of Harrington. “It’s only lately that rail is starting to make a comeback, sort of, because they realized especially with shipping containers, like if you see those trains with double stack shipping containers, you can move, double stacked, 400 at a time.”
In modern times, Svoboda explains, while diesel is still the fuel burned, the freight trains are actually creating their locomotion using electric motors.
“You have a big diesel engine in there,” says Svoboda, “but there’s no drive axle. The diesel engine is actually just a big generator for the electric motors that are down in the trucks below. One motor for each axle. I actually read about an instance where a small town lost power, where their electric generating facility went down and they actually brought in a couple of diesel engines on the rails to power the town.”
The Nonprofit Hudson Valley Railroad society is here as well, a society which model railroad co-ordinator Peter Canning says started in the 1960’s. Standing at a booth nearest the entrance the Canning explains.
“It was a group of model railroaders,” says Canning. “In the 70s the Hyde Park railroad station was going to be demolished by the town. It hadn’t been used since the 50s. This society took it over, refurbished it, and now it’s a museum.”
Nostalgia reigns heavy in the room.
Canning isn’t sure what it is about trains that fixate the model railroad hobbyist. Simply put, he is sure that people love them. Case in point: Trainspotting.
“It’s like birdwatching,” says Canning. “Trainspotters are just people that are fans of real life, prototypical trains. They want to find that engine, those specific boxcars. They look all over. They find out where to see them. Sometimes they’re called ‘foamers’. I don’t know who made that one up.”
Canning says there really isn’t an ur-prototypical type of train that commands the most enthusiasm.
“That’s all personal preference,” he says. “We’re here in New York so we’re fans of New York Central, which is long gone. We’re fans of the CSX rail which runs here. And we’re fans of Amtrak. We even got people that still like Norfolk-Southern.”
President of the Hudson Valley Railroad society Denny Evaul remembers steam trains still.
“Well this was 1945, 1946,” says Denny. “Our elementary school was right along the Pennsylvannia Reading Seashore line between Atlantic City and Camden, New Jersey. It was all steam trains back then, until the 60’s.”
No one interviewed seemed very excited about high speed rails or maglev trains. Uniformly they were dismissed for the expensive infrastructure that would have to be built to usher in progress. And anyway the old trains long off the rails are treasured still.
Whether nostalgia might be the primary component that compels the hobbysists is never quite nailed down. For Harrington his attraction to trains borders on the sublime.
“They are marvelous machines,” he says, “and works of art.”
As trains themselves are works of art then, so too can be considered trainwrecks. Before that train company came along to torch their own 115,000 gallons of spilled vinyl hydrochloride in East Palestine and creating that memorable sinister black cloud in the process, probably the most infamous train wreck in history happened at the Monteparnasse station in France. Preserved in a photograph for eternity, a steam locomotive failed to stop in time at the platform and instead went right on through the station wall. Because the station platform was on the second floor the steam engine came through the wall to fall and balance there on its nose.
Here at the train show derailments aren’t uncommon. But as with the model houses and model cars and model trees and even the model people, the trains and their boxcars can be held in the palm of a hand of a benevolent creator and be set right on their tracks to be moving along again in no time.
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