Great show - story courtesy of independantmail.com
EASLEY — Destiny Absher, 7, climbed across the seats of a small rail car Saturday while her friend Alex Beaty tested out the controls in the middle of the car.
Three rail cars stood in front of the doors to the 15th Annual Central Railway Model and Historical Association Train Show at the J.B. Owens Sports Complex in Easley.
“Guess what? He said he might drive us in this!” Destiny said.
“He” was Jim Hopkins, a member of the Greenville Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. Hopkins owns and operates two small rail cars, having ridden the rails with them in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia. He’s been interested in trains for 10 years.
Destiny’s dad, photographer Jonathan Absher, is also a train enthusiast. He looked on while Destiny and Alex clambered over the rail cars as he spoke about an 8-foot-by-10-foot display he keeps in his Simpsonville home.“You just pay a fee and ride for the weekend,” he said of the Easley event.
“It’s an historical display covering from 1941 to the end of steam locomotives,” he said.
Inside the Bagwell Gymnasium at the sports complex, three full basketball courts will remain filled until 5 p.m. today with things related to trains. Model trains, building kits, reference and historical books, and train magazines are there. Items for model train landscaping, crafter’s tools, and sound systems and accessories for trains are available as well.
Trains for little hands are available at a low table that bears a wooden track complete with scenery, miniature signs and model locomotives. It sits very near the toy area, where train stickers, books, puzzles and play mats can be found. The fictional steam locomotive Thomas the Tank Engine — star of books, videos and more — is there too.
Dave Winans of Simpsonville stood Saturday in front of a model display that was 37 feet long. He said that he “has been interested in model trains all my life.”
“And she married into it,” he added, speaking of his wife, Anne, who stood beside him.
“The big issue is trying to encourage younger people into an interest in model trains,” he said. “Other than Thomas the Tank Engine, I don’t think they’re into it as much as they used to be.”
Several of the models on display from the Piedmont & Southern Model Railroad Club of Greenville were built by Winans when he was a part of the club 20 years ago. He now has a 2.5 foot-by-10 foot model, “not a very big one,” in his home, he said.
The club began in the 1980s and took its name from the two major railways in the area at the time, the Piedmont & Northern and the Southern.
Dave Cummins of Georgia kept a watchful eye Saturday on the longest train display in the Easley complex, a 66-foot model with 2-inch scale tracks. He is glad to talk about the old days, when train tracks were not standardized and ranged anywhere from 2 feet to 6 feet across. For Cummins, railroads run in the family.
“My brother was a railroad fireman,” he said. “They would call him to move an engine, and my father would drive him to the tracks in his Model T Ford. I was about 6 years old, and I would ride along.”
That’s when he began to love trains and everything about them, he said.
“Out of high school, I went to work on a 3-foot narrow gauge railroad as a switchman,” he said.
Besides vendors and model trains from all over the Southeast, a display from the Central Railway Museum is set up just inside the front doors at the event this weekend. The museum is in a house owned by the city of Central. The Central Railway Model and Historical Association has gutted and rebuilt the interior of the structure. Ettie Ruppert takes care of publicity for the association and builds scenery for displays at the museum.
Central was a major railroad town in the 1940s because it was centrally located between Charlotte and Atlanta, which is how the city got its name, said Jack Green, curator of the museum.
“Steam locomotives needed water every 100 miles and coal every 200 miles and had to be serviced every 24 hours,” Green said. “Central was the ideal location for that.”
In terms of model railroads, a lot is involved with building one — first the wooden framework, then the electronics, and finally the landscaping. The Central Railway Association has put more than 2,000 hours of labor into renovating the museum and building displays. The club’s original membership total of 15 has grown to 50.
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