NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Keith Johnson and Steve Marquess both played with toy trains when they were little boys.
They both collect model trains now.
That’s about all they have in common - except that both are members of the Sugar Creek Model Railroad & Historical Society, which is hosting its annual Great Northwest Arkansas Model Train Show on Saturday.
“We couldn’t be more different,” said Marquess, who lives in Bentonville.
For starters, Marquess collects “N” scale trains. That means an engine is 3 to 4 inches long. Johnson collects “O” scale Lionel trains with enginesthat are 12 to 18 inches long.
Marquess has a room in his downtown home where he’s building a train layout. In his backyard near Farmington, Johnson has built a 20-by-50 foot building designed to resemble a depot. It has everything - heat, air conditioning, television, even a bed. “You couldn’t ask for a better ‘man cave,’” he said with a chuckle.
Trains and tracks are displayed on one wall, and in the middle of Johnson’s space, “two main tracks run down and around and underneath themselves, kind of like a big ‘3’ or an ‘E,’ with walkways so you can walk around to everything.”
The joy for Johnson is running his trains, but he’s also working on a lifelike layout that has a railroad yard, a downtown with an A&Wroot beer shop, a filling station, a depot and a diner. There are grain elevators, a cement plant and an oil well, all reflective of his childhoodin Oklahoma and his career in the oil business. Most of the buildingscome from kits, adapted by Johnson to suit his needs.
Marquess has buildings still in the foam-board stage of design, but he’s spending more of his time on specialized research.
“I’m interested in what the Frisco Railroad was doing in Fort Smith in 1980,” he said. So he’s modeling his buildings to look like Fort Smith and Van Buren and fashioning them from scratch or by adapting kits.
“I have the carpentry in place for the Whirlpool plant in Fort Smith, but I’m not counting on having the track actually laid into it before the end of March,” he said.
Johnson and Marquess are just a tiny example of the depth and breadth of the model train hobby, Marquess said.
“There are collectors, and there are builders and operators, all specialties within the hobby,” he explained. “Some people just like to see them go in circles, some have them on the shelf and never run them, and some want to operate them like a real railroad.”
Others, like John and Maida Bennett of Bella Vista, take their hobby outdoors. They have created a garden layout for their G-scale collection of German-made LGB (Lehmann’s Gross Bahn) trains. An engine is 14 or 15 inches long, and the track, which supplies the power to the trains, is 2 inches wide. The layout includes two big loops and about 400 feet of track, and the Bennetts have enough engines and cars for seven trains. “But we only run three trains and a trolley at a time.” Their particular hobby is called “garden railroading.”
Visitors to Saturday’s train show at the Clarion Hotel & Convention Center in Bentonville can learn about what’s available for specialty collectors - people interested in passenger trains of the 1940s, Marquess said by way of example - and see eight operating model train layouts in fi ve scales. There will also be vendors, a model contest open for public vote and a train that children can operate.
Proceeds from the show are used to maintain six portable model railroad layouts that members of the Sugar Creek Model Railroad & Historical Society take to charity and public events.
Life, Pages 6 on 02/23/2011