Collection shows love of trains

CHARLESTON, Ill. — Memories ride the rails of the HO gauge model train layout in a room of Jerry McRoberts’ Charleston home that was specially built for what has been a hobby of a lifetime.

“I’ve been building models since I was a kid,” the retired Eastern Illinois University professor said. And since he was a kid, his life has revolved in some manner around the railroad and the trains he grew up riding.

“My father was a conductor on the Waterloo Cedar Falls & Northern Railroad out of Waterloo, Iowa,” he said. “And that’s where the magic began. My uncle was the motorman, and sometimes I’d ride with them to Cedar Rapids, see a movie, see my aunt and come back in the evening.”

The main line of the WCF&N, an interurban electric freight and passenger railroad in Iowa, extended from Waterloo to Cedar Rapids and north to Waverly.

During the summer of 1943, when he was in the sixth grade, McRoberts said he would ride the Illinois Central’s Land O’Corn to Chicago with a boy his age named Dale Higdon, whose father worked in the shops for the WCF&N.

“We’d stay at the YMCA because it was very inexpensive, and I’d drag him to the museums,” he said. “I was always surprised my mother would let me do that, because she would never let me go swimming unless there was someone with me, and I was a lifeguard.

“Usually we’d stay a week or more. Using the El or buses to get around, we went to the Chicago Art Museum and the Museum of Natural History. We went to ball games, and movies with big bands and singers between shows. We also found the Shedd Aquarium and other sights.”

The urge to ride the rails and see the world beyond Waterloo never left him, he said.

“We did that each summer. I’d make some money and we’d go and spend it. You could live on hamburgers and stuff like that and the way we traveled was by coach. At night they’d come around and you’d buy a pillow. And, if you got to a big city, they’d come through with sandwiches,” he said. “We didn’t need anything else, so it didn’t cost us much money.”

One summer McRoberts said he and Higdon went to New York for more than two weeks. “I was much older then,” he said, “maybe in eighth grade, but definitely in junior high school.

“It was wonderful. We got to see the Rockettes, and we went to the Metropolitan Museum for a couple of days, the Museum of Modern Art, the Empire State Building, ballgames, Macy’s and the automat.”

Over the next several years, during his undergraduate and graduate study, which ended in a doctorate in art history, McRoberts said he made four more trips — solo — on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

“It had more mileage of track than any other railroad,” he said, “and I was very attracted to their steam engines. They were the reason I chose it as the railroad to be represented on my HO gauge layout, which is centered on the 1950s.”

McRoberts began the layout, for which he eventually would build an addition to his home, around 1966 after he had moved to EIU as an art historian.

“My first attempt to (build) an HO gauge layout was underneath the top of a desk in our den,” he said. “It was half a layout, going nowhere and only fit for switching.

“Late in the 1960s, my wife and I decided we needed an addition to the house. Half of it would be a family room, fireplace, and more storage space, and the other half would be for a train layout, with a custom-made desk for working on models and storage cabinets.”

The layout built by hand for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Northern Iowa and Illinois Railroad models contains three control drawers, three power packs and miles of wires, which are grouped together as cables.

The layout is about 10 feet, 9 inches by 17 feet, 6 inches, and contains 337 feet, 6 inches of track, 45 turnouts (switches), including a double crossover, turntable, a reversing wye and a four-way crossing. The railroad room houses a work desk and large storage cabinets.

There are 185 railroad cars, with the Northern Iowa and Illinois, Pennsylvania Railroad and Illinois Central represented by the most cars.

Seventy-seven trucks and 161 automobiles from the 1950s can be seen on the roads and in the parking lots of miniature factories, businesses and the seven stations. Six bridges, including trestle, truss and plate bridges, span areas of the layout, and of course, there’s a roundhouse.

The trains pass through a tunnel, running underneath the layout for several feet. Paying strict attention to detail, McRoberts smudged the top of the tunnel entrance as though steam engines, the real thing, have passed through it.

There are stockyards and livestock, and the Waterloo Office Supply Building, which in McRoberts’ miniature world has become G.W. McRoberts Office-School Supplies and Equipment Co. and represents the place where McRoberts worked at his first job.

There’s a diner called Bobbie’s Diner, which, tongue in cheek, he named for his wife, Roberta, who doesn’t like cooking; and Gilpatrick Oil Co., named for her father.

“I’ve tried to name things after people and places I know,” McRoberts said. There’s Lynn Hill, a station named after his daughter, Lynn, and Scott Oil named for son Jeff Scott.

Tiny people are busy at work and a couple of boys fish on the slough surrounded by green trees, part of the 302 trees that landscape the layout. A creek fed by a crystal clear spring in Waterloo is called Cedar Springs on the layout. There are flat cars of John Deere tractors, and others of Caterpillar equipment.

Paintings by McRoberts hang on the wall in the train room. They include his first oil, done when he was 12 or 13 of an imaginary train wreck in a desert.

A second, an opaque watercolor representing a small section of the Illinois Central’s huge division yard in Waterloo, was painted in 1950 from a third-story window in East Waterloo High School when McRoberts was a senior.

“My wife and I had never gone on a trip where we traveled first class,” he said. “So, in 1989, we went first class to New Orleans to see a Rodin show. I have a model of the exact car we were in. It has six compartments and 10 roomettes.”

Everything on the layout is cataloged, he said.

McRoberts retired from teaching at Eastern in 1999. “I’ve absolutely enjoyed every minute spent working on this,” he said. “I would have been crazy if I hadn’t had something to do with my hands.”

He said he runs the trains at least five days a week and maintenance is continual.

He said he likes to hear “the click ... click ... click sound” the trains make as they travel the tracks through the miniature world of Deer Creek, Cedar Springs, Lynn Hill, Center Point, Iowa Junction and, finally, Cedar Bend.