The Story of St Jacobs & Aberfoyle Model Railway

by Lynda L Wilson

  Wayne smiled and waved from his seat up in the control room, happily running a passenger train back and forth over a section of track near Eastport Beach, checking for a problem encountered during an operating session a few days before.

  Chuck was not far away, his torso as much a part of the landscape as the movie theatre to his left. He was having another look at a bridge for the CN line, measuring to be certain it was exactly right and then giving it a good whack with the palm of his hand to nudge it more firmly into place.

  As he worked, Chuck told the long and intriguing story of how the group came to be in their permanent location in St. Jacobs. Aberfoyle ran the trains for visitors to the layout every Sunday for the six months each year the Flea Market was open. By 1979, it was becoming apparent they were outgrowing what had initially been designed as a one-person operation. Frank was working at the Bruce Nuclear Plant and was quick to take advantage of a 40' x 100' Quonset building that had become available — the perfect size for the group's growing aspirations. Wayne owned a roadside property only a kilometre or so away from the Aberfoyle Flea Market. Along with friends and family, the group completed the Herculean task of dismantling the Quonset building from its pad at the Bruce plant. Ten thousand bolts had to be unscrewed and the steel rings jackhammered loose from their concrete footings. The steel rings were loaded onto pallets and shipped the 160 kilometres to Aberfoyle where the collapsed structure remained for the next few years as the group planned their new layout design and how the building could house a gift store, mezzanine, and lounge area.

  In 1982, just six weeks before their lease was up at the Aberfoyle Flea Market, the concrete pad was finally being poured. Another rush of friends and family helped to finish erecting the Quonset building and the real work of dismantling the old layout and reconstructing and expanding the new layout had begun.

  The most intriguing part of the new building was an elevated control tower the group devised that would be constructed right in the middle of the layout. The goal was for the operators to have a 360-degree view of every aspect of the railway. "Right from the outset," said Chuck, "we had decided we were going to try and do a show-business type of performance rather than what the usual model railroaders do; you know, where they’re hanging out on the railway, talking to people. We just wanted to be out of sight. We wanted the layout itself to be the thing they noticed."

  As a very skilled and creative electrician, Chuck was able to design the layout’s wiring in such a way that the visitor's experience of the model railway was never interrupted by an operator popping in and out of the countryside with a remote in his hand. This was achieved by running 600 wires down from the control tower and through conduits carefully pre-planned under the concrete slab. These conduits fanned out to subpanels and relay boxes so the railway could be managed from the control tower.

  All around the 4000-square-foot structure, grid lines were drawn on the concrete floor in chalk. The placement of the old railway and the design of the new track were drawn over the chalk with felt pens. Sections of the layout were then carefully placed on top of the grid and new sections were installed with "L"-girder benches built directly on the floor and brought up to precise height and placement with plumb lines. While this work was evolving, Gwen was able to begin the major task of breathing life into the layout by covering the hard-shell plaster on wire mesh with grass and trees. She constructed the landscape out of a number of ingenious materials, including trees made of dried golden rod and wire, ground cover of dyed sawdust (most of it from the cutting of 40,000 ties eventually hand-laid by Frank as he constructed the track), and ground foam created by stuffing pieces of an old queen-sized foam mattress into a blender and chopping it into irregular sizes.

  Meanwhile, Craig was busy constructing a number of the buildings for the layout (he would eventually contribute approximately 75 percent of the structures, many of them scratch-built from buildings he had admired, photographed, measured and recreated in exacting detail).

  All of the buildings close to the edge of the layout were wired, and this is by far the most popular and unique feature of the Aberfoyle Junction. In 1987, about three years after they opened in the Quonset building, Chuck devised an intricate night scene that has awed visitors for the last 30 years. He calls it "old school" today, but the effect is magical. Some buildings have as many as 10 separate lights, each hooked up to different circuits. This creates a wonderful sense of life going on through the night — bathroom lights go on and off in some of the houses, the movie theatre marquee in the town of Westport switches off sometime around midnight and, in the dead of night, one of Craig's remarkable passenger trains winds through town, lights appropriately dimmed in the cars, some sleepless passengers sitting at tables, a lonely whistle blowing at a major crossing. It is a familiar, intimate experience visitors can relate to; there are very few dry eyes when the lights come up.

  To achieve this effect, Chuck hand-built a circuit drum out of weeping tile. The drum is run by a small motor and takes eight minutes to complete a full revolution, the duration of the night scene. He cut small strips of tile to create cams and glued these to the drum in what looks like a random fashion and length, but, as with all things Chuck turns his attention to, there was purpose, method, and careful thought to the positioning of each cam on the tile. As the drum slowly rotates, the cams hit a row of micro-switches at the base of the drum that are wired to 64 different circuits. The light on a particular circuit will go on for the length of the individual cam. This creates a miraculous, lifelike scene for Aberfoyle's audience, all accomplished long before computers and other electronic devices became available for model layouts.

  "The night scene creates a whole new layout," Mike Craig said, as he walked by and overheard Chuck's explanation. "You see everything during the day, but at night, that's when you see the interior detail of the buildings. The man-hours that have gone into it..." He shook his head in wonder.

  When he was putting the scene together, Chuck created a schedule for each of the buildings to mimic the randomness of life. He set up six 2000-watt dimmers, all in a row, that slowly turn the overhead lights off at the beginning of the night scene. There is a worm gear and then another gear on each of the dimmers attached to yet another motor. The overhead lights take three minutes to go down completely (the equivalent of an Aberfoyle Junction twilight). At the end of five minutes, a switch is automatically thrown that turns the dimmers slowly back on until "daybreak".

  "It’s funny," Chuck said. "When you have 40 or 50 people in the room and you can hear them all chattering, 'Oh, look at that! Isn’t that fantastic?' You kind of start feeling good, you know? And what I also found was that sometimes it would dwindle down and there would be one person in the room for maybe half an hour, or maybe nobody at all. And I thought, I don’t really like this." He laughed. "I must be a ham or something! I like it when everybody is there."

  Aberfoyle Junction flourished for 26 years in the Quonset building, delighting thousands of visitors during the five to seven weekends they were open to the public each year. The railway had been a much-loved part of the local landscape for many, many years with model railroad enthusiasts travelling from as far away as England and France to see the layout. But in 2010, it became clear the Quonset building was deteriorating and required more repairs than the structure was worth. There was also a new landlord with a different vision for the piece of land by the highway. The group searched for two years to find a permanent home, but either the space was inadequate or the lease was more than they could afford. "We thought the layout was destined for the landfill," said Chuck, studying his bridge and then crawling under the layout to pop up again in the middle of the landscape. "Gwen and I had actually gotten to the point where we said, let's just forget about this. We'd had enough. It was almost 40 years."

  At the 11th hour, the model railway was rescued by some benefactors Gwen refers to as her "angels." Not only did this ensure the model railway would continue delighting audien
ces for many years to come, it also brought the disheartened seniors back to life. "Before we found the new home for the railway, I'd do an hour's work and then I'd have to sit down for another hour to recuperate," Chuck said. "It was getting to that point. But then this facility and opportunity came along. The work doesn't bother me at all now. It's like I've gone back about 20 years of my life." And to look at him crawling under the layout to fix a wire or jimmy another piece into place, you believe it.

  When they opened the doors of the St. Jacobs building for the first time in August 2012, they walked into a cold, 5000-square foot shell with cinderblock walls and a concrete floor. With a limited budget and a daunting task ahead, the small group were overwhelmed by a rush of volunteers, friends, family, and modellers who were eager to help. Drywallers appeared, painters, construction workers, truckers — all of them donating their time, expertise, even the gas to transfer load after load of material from the Quonset building in Aberfoyle to the new building in St. Jacobs. Over the next several weeks, an 85-foot wall was erected and drywalled, a control room for the operators with six windows overlooking the layout was designed and built, an educational area and a gift store were all mapped out and pieced together as time and number of volunteers would allow. "People just kept coming," Gwen said. "We would need a certain job done and, like magic, someone with that particular skill would appear on our doorstep."

  Meanwhile, at the old Quonset building, hundreds of scratch-built structures on the layout had to be carefully dismantled and all the wiring separated and labelled; thousands of trees, bridges, and automobiles removed and stored away. It was also vitally important to preserve the 1600 feet of track that had been hand-laid by Frank Dubery. With this in mind, Chuck and Craig spent hours measuring and designing a plan to cut the layout into pieces so it could be transferred and reconstructed in precisely the same way in the new building. They decided the most efficient way would be to reproduce the ceiling grid of the Quonset building. Using the same configuration of tiling and by measuring out from the walls, they added a dropped ceiling in the St. Jacobs facility that was a duplicate of the Quonset building. Plumb lines hung from the ceiling grid in the Quonset building to the edges of the layout provided the basis for their measurements, which could then be transferred to the new building using the same technique. When this was completed, the sky-boards surrounding the layout were constructed in the new facility.

  "The whole curved backdrop was up before we brought the layout over here," Mike said. "That's a risky manoeuvre in itself because it's either going to work or it's not going to work. It worked out perfectly. All of the ceiling lights, all of the cameras, all of that was in before the layout was brought over. Chuck even built the electrical panels at home and then brought them over here."

  "I call him the genius of Aberfoyle Junction," Gwen said, a few feet away, dipping a paintbrush into a small Tupperware container of acrylic. Overhearing, Chuck blushed and cleared his throat. "All the electrical, the night scene, the panels, construction of most of the scenery, Chuck was the main man."

  "This is the first guy that goes up a 20-foot ladder, stands on the top...." Mike said.

  And Chuck, having heard enough, crawled under the layout to get away.

  In all, the layout was sliced into 51 sections between 25-75 square feet each. Chuck carefully measured the 16-foot cube van Wayne had acquired for moving the layout. He sat down with graph paper and cut out replicas of each of the 51 pieces. He designed a way to construct shelves they could position in the van and then moved the scale layout pieces around on the graph paper until he had the perfect configuration for loading. Over a four-day period they made 11 trips with Wayne behind the wheel.

  At the St. Jacobs location, the layout was then lifted piece by piece onto its legs and attached to the sky-boards. The move was too rigorous for a few pieces (some over 40 years old), and these had to be reconstructed from photographs that were taken of each section before it was dismantled.

  The central control tower was impossible to recreate in the new location, and so the group decided on a walled-in control room with six windows, high above the layout on the east side of the building. Thirty-one cameras were installed over areas where there are uncoupling magnets on the layout, and 11 monitors in the control room provide a close-up view of these and other sections like the staging yards behind the sky-boards.

  In all, 45 volunteers came forward, some for a day or two, others on a regular basis. From May 1, 2012, until the doors opened to the public in St. Jacobs almost a year and half later, more than 12,000 hours were logged by the members and volunteers, averaging 28 hours of cumulative work per day (Monday to Friday). "There's no way we could have done this without the help that we've received," Chuck said, crawling out from under the layout again. "It really has been remarkable."

  Throughout the move, the group never allowed themselves to become overwhelmed. "At the start, you see nothing," Chuck said, "But bit by bit, day by day, something happens and you know in your own mind, if you do a little bit every day, eventually you get to the end. It all works."

  "It just never seemed like it was an impossible task," Gwen added.

  Craig, meanwhile, hopped back up on top of the layout again (the group call him Luke Trackwalker) and continued his journey through the miniature countryside, searching for tiny imperfections in the track work that only he could see. He jumped down and crawled on his hands and knees under the railway to hurry on to another task, while Gwen, the picture of concentration, brought the countryside to vibrant life with her artist's eye. "We consider ourselves lucky to have this in our lives," she said, wiping her hands on a cloth. "Not only do we have something to do everyday, but it's a legacy that we're leaving, it's a bit of us. It's nice to think that what we did will be here many years later, after we're gone."

  Chuck nodded his head in agreement. "I'm 78 now, just motoring along like crazy," he said with a wide smile. "I can't believe it. It's all because of this work. When I see on TV some of these people who are 95 or 100 and they're still driving their cars or running things for other people where they're the leader, not some younger person, I think maybe I'm going in that direction." You could hear the wonder again in his voice. He chuckled and shook his head. "I don't know, but it's all because of this. So, I feel good about this thing. Really."

  And with that, Chuck Bard went back to work.

  The original location of the model railway was on the second floor of this barn at the Aberfoyle Flea Market.

  Frank Dubery by the benchwork for the start of the original model railway.

  Gay Dubery and Gwen Bard are removing scenery items to prepare for the move to the Quonset building.

  The Quonset building being dismantled at Bruce Nuclear A Plant before being transported to Aberfoyle.

  Frank Dubery assembles roadbed for the townsite of Westport. The strips of roadbed will be covered with Tentest. The opening to Frank's left is where the lift bridge will eventually be placed.

  A view of the finished model railway in the Quonset building. The control tower for the operators is in the centre of the layout.

  In the spring of 1983, Craig works on a model of the Canada Crushed Stone plant while Gwen is making trees.

  The finished room at St. Jacobs ready to receive the model railway. The windows in the far wall allow the operators to observe most of the layout.

  The partially rebuilt railway in St. Jacobs.

  The control room in St. Jacobs. Each panel controls a portion of the model railway. The monitors on the wall give operators a close-up view of various sections of the railway.

  At Wellington Union station a CPR Canadian prepares to depart beside a CN overnight train.

  A CN freight train passes a family camping at the base of the escarpment, while down below a CP switcher works Aberfoyle Junction.

  The view of the city of Wellington behind a new factory under construction at Eastport Beach.

  Chuck Bard’s scratch-built model of CP1201 pass
es three of Craig Webb’s structures at Caledon Junction.

  The observation car of a CPR train arriving at the station in Westport. A CPR self-propelled railcar is on the layover track.

  When the model railway was rebuilt in St. Jacobs, a scratch-built model of one of the local Mennonite Meeting houses near St. Jacobs was added.

  A close-up view of some buildings in Westport. To help set the era, the artists chose businesses that used to exist, such as the Tamblyn Drug Store.

  The CN #6060 arrives with an intercity passenger train at Wellington Union station while, on an adjacent track, a local commuter train waits.

  This operating lift bridge carries trains between Eastport and Westport.

  Craig Webb built a model of his own house. A woman peers out from the back porch window.

  A wedding party stands out front the King George V Hotel.