"The smell of the layout, it just smells like Aberfoyle," he said. "It's kind of a musty, old smell, but when you walked into the old facility, it was that distinct Aberfoyle smell. It's come over here to the new facility, which is so nice because it still smells like the same place that I remember. That's what I like — it reminds me of my grandpa."
We continued our tour of the layout and along the way Mike pointed out the features that were distinctly his grandfather — in particular the elegant track work. "Every time I'm here I think of him. And he gets talked about a lot. Even today I had a phone call, somebody asking for Mr. Dubery, and I said, well, 'You're about eight years too late!'
"He's still very much alive around here, though. As far as the hobby goes in the world, he was huge. I have his Master Model Railroader certificate that I'm going to get reframed. It deserves to be up here. He was very proud of it. He was number 74."
The Master Modeller designation is very difficult to obtain, which is why even 36 years later, there are only a few more than 500 people in the world who have achieved the distinction. Modellers are required to obtain certificates of achievement in seven different categories, such as building an award-winning structure or locomotive or giving back to the hobby through volunteerism, publication or leadership.
"We still poke fun at my grandfather because he was a guy who loved fiddly stuff — the more fiddly the better," Mike said. "For example cutting the railway ties on a table saw and ripping the wood down — there are over 40,000 ties that are here.” He laid a hand on the track. "It's just something that shows the amount of fiddliness he enjoyed." He pointed to a signal post. "Even these are all made from scratch. And I think he took great, great pride in the fact that much of the track was hand-laid. Everything for the turnouts, the little pieces; taking the rail and making it into sections. Just the track alone — how many hundreds of hours?" He trailed off, shaking his head.
Mike came for tea at his mother's home several months before in Cambridge, Ontario. Ginny's house is filled with her father's art, his miraculous pencil drawings of locomotives and ships. Mike was sitting at the kitchen table in front of a box of his grandfather's many awards and ribbons. He was the only grandchild who had a lasting interest in the model railway. "As a kid, Aberfoyle was a magical thing; it was like Christmas," he said. "I remember going there on the weekends when Aberfoyle was open and I couldn’t sleep the night before; I’d be up all night. That’s probably my best memory of my grandparents. Plus I got to operate the trains," he added, and his eyes actually lit up. "They liked to send me under the railroad. I was the only one who could reach up. I loved it as a kid — I still love it."
His grandfather's love of trains began as a young boy in England. Frank spent countless hours watching the steam locomotives belching down the tracks in London and kept a logbook of all of their numbers as they went by. "Trainspotting in England was a big thing," Ginny explained, taking a sip of tea. "In his day, they didn’t have TV, they went on the side of the hill and watched for trains. He had a booklet of all the numbers that he saw as a kid. He would look at a train and he would say, 'That’s 1573!'"
"I have a locomotive that my grandpa left me in his Will," Mike said. "It’s one that he won a national first prize for. But, you have to look at the detail in it because everything is made by hand, even the little chains that hang off the front. It's all metal that he's bent. He would get an actual picture of a locomotive, he would get the technical drawing, and then he would figure out the scale and replicate the parts from scratch."
"But he was a draftsman, too," Ginny added.
"A master draftsman," Mike said. "I can remember him always being in his workshop, always working on something. He modelled North American, but he was a big British modeller, too. He always had something on the go and usually more than one thing. He basically lived and breathed trains — that's what he did every spare second he had. Looking back on it now, the things he came up with, the things he did, and the things that I saw were just amazing. I didn't have quite the appreciation then, being so young."
With her lifetime of experience around model railroaders, when asked what she thought fuelled the passion of the unique group at Aberfoyle, Ginny was silent for a moment. "It's like a make-believe land for them," she said. "It’s like being a kid still." And then she smiled.
Back at the layout, Chuck Bard, the first member who joined Frank in 1973, was standing by the side of the tracks. “Frank was a highly detailed model builder,” he said. He pointed to two sets of tracks on the layout that ran parallel to each other. “These are mainline tracks and those are yard tracks. It’s part of this whole system, but the yard tracks are not as high as the mainline tracks; they're probably 1/16th of an inch shorter than the mainline tracks. It’s almost not noticeable. Most model railroaders don’t bother making that change, but he did. Then, he would hand-lay all of these tracks and then spike them with miniature spikes. You can’t even see them. And for the ballast, he went out to the various railways like the CN, and he picked up a bunch of stones and found out what the average size was. Then he sifted those stones until he had pieces that were about 1/48th of the average size of real stones.”
And that is the ballast you see on the tracks of Aberfoyle Junction, real stones from the CN line, hand-sifted precisely to scale over 40 years ago by Frank Dubery.
Chuck Bard is another remarkable character. You don’t need to ask anyone who has known him for any length of time what he was like as a young man, you can see the young man – he is still very much present. There is a shy innocence about him and he has a sense of wonder that sneaks out every so often when he is talking about his trains or baseball or about Gwen, his wife of 57 years. Happily, he is also a natural storyteller. A retired electrician, at 78 years of age he is an intriguing fellow. He has the energy of someone far, far younger. He laughs often and, when his shyness takes over, pushes his glasses up on his nose and smiles at the ground. He is small in stature but in admirable shape from a lifetime of activity. You only have to look at him to know that Chuck Bard has a way of getting things done.
Down in the workroom of Chuck and Gwen's comfortable home in Guelph, Chuck reminisced about his first train set, a Lionel electric train, that arrived under the Christmas tree when he was 4 years old. That was the beginning of a life-long passion. Like Frank before him, Chuck grew up with a fascination for trains and, of course, for steam locomotives. "This is back in the days when everybody seemed to travel by train — passenger trains were coming and going all over the place," Chuck said. He was always around trains, particularly at the age of 13 when he held down three paper routes (the papers all arriving daily by train) to finance the building of his first large scratch-built layout. He still has an engine that he bought in 1948 with paper-route money.
Baseball was his second passion and he was an accomplished catcher for much of his youth. "He had the strongest arm in the county," Gwen, sitting by his side, said proudly, "And he has always had a love of music. He is also a talented classical pianist." Chuck crossed his arms over his chest and smiled shyly down at the floor.
Gwen Bard has the direct, steady gaze of someone who knows exactly what she wants and how to get it. She is 75 years old, but doesn't look anywhere near it. She has thick, shoulder-length grey hair and her dark eyes seem stern until you experience her warm smile. She is as tireless as her husband and has been by his side through every incarnation of the layout. Always artistic, as a young child she was drawing pictures and entertaining the young kids in the neighbourhood, telling stories and illustrating them. "I always sketched," she said. "My other friends were just skipping rope and doing things like that, but I was more focussed on pictures." And it is Gwen Bard's beautiful "pictures" that you see gracing the skyboards around the entire expanse of Aberfoyle Junction. It is also Gwen's imaginative handiwork that breathes life into the layout's landscape. The group affectionately refer to her as Mother Nature.
When asked if she always had an inter
est in model railroads, Gwen looked up and without a hint of a smile said, "No. The hobby of model railroading is not my favourite thing. I like the creative process. I like painting. I like the scenery. I like to see it take shape and be part of it all with him," she said, smiling over at her husband.
When she wasn't working on the scenery or the day-to-day functioning of Aberfoyle Junction, Gwen ran a small custom mural business with her daughter-in-law Maggie. Over an eleven-year period, the pair completed hundreds of murals on walls all over southwestern Ontario. "We did faux finishes, marbleizing on fireplaces and walls. We did a mural of the Titanic on a 15-foot wall, a jungle scene in a gym, the Cleveland Stadium on an office wall. Chuck painted about 40,000 heads in the crowd for us! We did the murals on the walls of the Small Animal Clinic at the University of Guelph. We did model homes and businesses," Gwen said. "We would go in and not have a sketch or anything. We would just go right up to the blank wall and start. Sometimes we would research a little bit, but our conversation with the person would get us all fired up and we'd get ideas. It would take about two minutes and then we would get to work. Until we put the first mark on the wall, it was intimidating. But the minute we painted a stroke, we were on our way!" Gwen has a scrapbook of each and every mural and the work is beautiful, whimsical, accomplished. "That's why I'm part of Aberfoyle and St. Jacobs," Gwen said, as if some explanation were necessary. "I have to be creative."
"You know," she said suddenly, looking over at Chuck, "we often wonder, is it just by chance we met each other? I guess we just knew it was right because we met in September and we were married in March. We just kind of clicked. I was 17 and then turned 18 in November. Chuck was the old, very mature person of 21," she said and laughed, but she was also clearly serious.
“She was walking down the main street in Guelph," Chuck said, grinning. "She comes from Galt, and I’m out there motoring, looking to see if there are any girls walking down the main street. I was with my two buddies, and if they were going to land an acquaintance with some girl, I was always the left out guy, always. So, there were two girls and there were three of us. We tooted the horn.” The two girls accepted a ride back to Galt along with dinner at a restaurant. “I thought, it’s going to be the same deal. Those two yokels are going to wind up dating those two girls and I’m going to be out of luck. So, I don’t know how it happened, but Gwen picked me as the guy she would go out with the next week. That’s how it started," he said with a look of 57-year-old wonder on his face. He touched Gwen's arm gently and you could feel the strength of their love for each other.
“I’ve got to show you a picture," Chuck said, jumping up. He pointed to a collage behind glass on the wall over his desk. "That’s a picture of me and one of the fellows that I was with. We’re in Yankee Stadium at the World Series in ’56." Chuck was in Yankee Stadium with his buddy during the World Series in 1956 when Don Larsen pitched a perfect game. “There’s the ticket,” he said, pointing at a ticket stub next to the photograph. “Anyway, I had just met Gwen a week or two before and we had already decided we were in love. So, after that I went down to Florida and I sent her a postcard and she’s got the postcard here.” He pointed to a postcard beside the Don Larsen ticket. “And it doesn’t say anything about, 'I love you. I miss you.' It says, 'Hey, did you see Don Larsen’s perfect game on TV? Wasn’t that marvellous?' So, when I got back, she said, 'What’s this all about?'" He chuckled and once again, there is that look of wonder, almost as though if he were to blink, it would all disappear, all be taken away.
"I was 17 years old," Gwen said. "When he said he was leaving to go to New York, I said, 'Good. We need time to think, time apart.' I was 17," she said again, laughing. "I was imagining him in New York doing exactly what I was doing — stressing."
Instead, Chuck was having the time of his life. A crowd formed after the game, a huge crowd of ecstatic, screaming fans, knowing they had just witnessed history, all of them shoving happily, pushing to get their ticket stubs to a man in the middle of a growing throng who feverishly signed each and every one. Chuck didn't even know who the man was, but he shoved his ticket through anyway and Ed Sullivan signed his stub and passed it back to him.
The two were married in 1957 and Chuck's modelling days came to an abrupt end with a burgeoning career as an electrician and as a new father. When their first son was 1-1/2 years old (the couple have three sons), Chuck decided it was time to introduce him to model railroads. "The train was never really for Brian," Gwen said, grinning, and Chuck feigned a look of shock. The layout eventually took up their entire basement. "We actually had the kitchen moved from downstairs to upstairs and took down a wall to make it fit!"
Chuck was a Lionel convert from early on because of the realism he could obtain with Lionel, but he was always bothered by the track. “These were Lionel so you would snap the track together," he said. "One of the things about Lionel is that it has three rails — it has a central rail for the electrical power. With scale they use both outside rails as the electrical power and it looks a lot more realistic. I used to stare at that middle rail and hope it would go away, but it never did.” He chuckled.
One fateful day in May 1973, Chuck drove out to the Aberfoyle Flea Market to have a look at the model railway he had heard so much about. He found himself overwhelmed by the scope of Frank’s vision and the attention to detail that was possible with 'O'-gauge modelling. That was the official end of his days with Lionel. “I could immediately see the difference between Lionel trains and full scale trains of the same scale — they were much more detailed." He invited Frank to come to Guelph to see his basement layout and Frank came that same day. "Frank said to me, ‘Okay, I think you’re the guy,'" Chuck said. "'If you can do that quality out at Aberfoyle, we’ll be a great team.’ So, within three or four weeks, I built that huge escarpment we still have. I built it in my basement and garage. It was made in three sections so you could get them into a half-ton pickup. I transported it out to Aberfoyle, set it in place, and we were bonded forever!"
"They became like brothers," Gwen said. "They were really close."
"And then he found out I could scratch-build locomotives," Chuck continued. "I didn’t even know I could! I just tried a few — that was Frank's suggestion — and they worked out and I kept going and going and building all sorts of Canadian locomotives. I think I've built something like 35 now."
"And they're all over the world," Gwen said, leaning forward. "We don’t even know where they are."
"When we were still in the barn at the Aberfoyle Mill it was a much smaller room, of course. Frank was running locomotives that were mostly American. He wanted to make it into an Ontario layout, but you couldn't buy Canadian steam locomotives. I had a lot of the tools at home already. I did buy miniature lathes and miniature milling machines. They were called Unimat. They were tiny things — a real machinist would look at them and almost smile they were so small. As time went on, I bought bigger milling machines. It's crazy, " Chuck said, shaking his head. "Those locomotives run about $4000 a piece and I've determined, by keeping track of my hours, that I made about $7 an hour!"
Frank and Chuck continued designing and building the layout at Aberfoyle, expanding as time and space allowed. Gwen worked on the scenery and helped run the admission counter. Gay was there every step of the way, serving lunches, working the till, happily running back and forth between the railway and her job in the gift store, and then Wayne Pfeiffer came onboard to help operate the trains.
Nebraska-born Wayne Pfeiffer has been a professor of Agricultural Economics and Business at the University of Guelph since 1972. Like the other members of this elite group, he has had a lifelong interest in the construction of model trains and railways (he built a brass steam locomotive from scratch some years ago that occasionally makes an appearance on the layout), but his main involvement with Aberfoyle Junction has been in the operation of the trains. His other hobby is collecting toy trains and Wayne Pfeiffer is a serious collector. His Lionel train coll
ection is possibly one of the largest in Canada, a fact he shared reluctantly, though with the slightest hint of pride in his voice. When asked about actually seeing the collection, he was more hesitant still. He sat back in his chair and paused for a moment before allowing that one day in the future perhaps a single photograph could be taken of him in front of his collection. He is also a collector of vintage automobiles (25 and counting) that are stored in various locations, including a few museums, but those are off limits as well. And then after another moment of serious contemplation, "Well, if I got one of the British sports cars shined up in the summertime, I guess a picture could be taken of me beside it," he said.
Wayne is an enigma. He has a rich sense of humour and, like Chuck, is an entertaining storyteller with an uncanny ability not to wander, even when you think he is. There is a point and a purpose to any story he shares and he manages to come full circle every time; there are absolutely no loose ends with Wayne Pfeiffer. He has a carefully tended moustache and sad, tired eyes that are at odds with his contagious energy and eagerness to please. He was a pleasure to spend an hour or two with in the Faculty Lounge at the University of Guelph on a cold, winter afternoon. It was on a similar afternoon 40 years before that he first met Chuck Bard.
Chuck had heard about Wayne's Lionel collection from a mutual acquaintance and decided to give him a call. Chuck was still heavily into Lionel at the time, just months before he would meet Frank Dubery and change his direction forever. Chuck called up and, after talking trains for several minutes, asked if he could come by to see Wayne's collection. Wayne agreed and opened the door to Chuck Bard for the first time.
The Story of St Jacobs & Aberfoyle Model Railway Page 2
