Model railroad engineers open doors to JBER public

  • Published
  • By David Bedard
  • JBER PAO
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  One step into the Military Society of Model Railroad Engineers' clubroom and people may be forgiven if they feel like Gulliver during his perilous voyage to Lilliput, home of a people 1-12 scale of Gulliver's size.

Several elaborate train layouts lay on top of each other and feature different scales of model trains.

The layout's "towns" are populated with citizens, commerce, store fronts, cars and artificial plant life.

Mike Bishop, MSMRE treasurer, said club members build and operate model trains simply for the high fun factor.

The treasurer further explained the layout relies on the many disciplines incumbent in the club's membership roster.

"It's something we can all do and enjoy," Bishop explained. "It gives you a variety of different things you can do - anything from electrical work, carpentry work, painting, sculpture and any type of art form that you can imagine is involved in a model railroad."

One such artisan is club member Fred Wing. Wing spread out several tackle boxes filled with tiny trains meticulously painted to match Alaska Railroad Corporation equipment from every era.

"This one right here is an (Electro-Motive Division) GP30," Ring said proudly while clutching the engine, minutely detailed in period-correct livery.

"It served through the 70s and made 2,250 horsepower from its diesel electric."

Ring, wearing a conductor's hat bedecked in pins representing railroad corporations across the United States, pulled all kinds of treasures from his boxes, everything from engines to boxcars to railroad maintenance equipment, many fabricated to the smallest detail to approximate an Alaska Railroad item.

Like many of his club cohorts, Ring is a scale zealot, which is to say he is fiercely loyal to his tiny 1-148 N scale trains and sees little use for the other sizes.

Bishop explained the club primarily represents five model railroad scales.

At the small end of the spectrum, Z scale weighs in at a truly lilliputian 1-to-220, followed by the aforementioned N scale.

The H0 scale is the most popular scale worldwide at 1-to-87 and is half the size of 0 scale, hence the H0 designation. The 0 scale was the most popular scale until unseated by H0 in the 1960s.

The newest and largest scale commonly encountered at the club is the G scale, or G gauge, and can be as large as 1-22 scale running on 45mm gauge track.

If the members are somewhat parochial when it comes to scale, they are nonetheless unanimous when it comes to their passion for the real thing.

Bishop struggled to put into words the allure of trains.

"The mystique of the railroad is hard to define," he said. "It's just something we like. It's my artistic outlet. Personally, I like the old-fashioned steam locomotives from the mountains of Colorado."

Bishop said the club's layouts represent much of the United States and include a Memphis, Tenn. rail yard, a Minneapolis-St. Paul layout and a Seattle layout.

The treasurer said the hobby has evolved quite a bit in the past few decades. The club's layouts use a digital command and control system. Hobbyists use wired or radio controls which send a signal through the track to a computer chip in the model train engine.

The club uses closed-circuit television to monitor trains as they pass through tunnels which cannot be otherwise observed directly.

Bishop said those who are interested in club membership can bring their own trains, but they must be marked so as not to get mixed in with others' models.

"If you have your own stuff and you want to run it, you can," he said. "If you need help getting your stuff set up and getting yourself running, we'll help you do that."

"That's one of the big advantages of belonging to a model railroad club, because if you don't know what you're doing, there's someone in the club who does."

Bishop said the club meets every Tuesday at 7 p.m., and every Saturday at 1 p.m. Every third Saturday, the club opens its doors to visitors.

For more information about MSMRE, call 552-5234, or visit www.trainweb.org/msmre.