Model railroad club keeps track of the past

Starting at Union Station in Los Angeles, it takes about 20 to 25 minutes to reach the end of the line at the Bakersfield rail yards.

“Close to an hour round trip,” Paul Koehler said. “That’s assuming there’s other trains on the railroad and you’re waiting for traffic. If you were down here by yourself, you could do a lot quicker.”

“Yeah, at reasonable speeds,” Dominick Cistone added. “Or unreasonable speeds.”

It’s all a matter of scale for members of the Glendale Model Railroad Club. At the group’s clubhouse, located in Fremont Park, a 25-foot-by-40-foot framework supports the more than 1,100 feet of track that make up the miniature Verdugo Valley Lines.

Efficiency, not speed, is the organization’s aim. The members’ operations — along with their model rail system, which depicts the operations of the former Southern Pacific Railroad — have been more than 50 years in the making.

Once a month, the public is invited to view this model of efficiency during the club’s open house. This past Saturday, rail fans young and old got to watch as one dispatcher and five engineers, who oversee the model trains from inside a loft overlooking the entire system, called in orders — by phone — to other club members in the rail yards several feet below.

“There’s a lot of skills involved,” Cistone said. “Electronics, art, construction. A lot of detail work that is required to make these things operational.”

There are 14 miniature bridges and trestles, 21 tunnels and countless model buildings, trees, cars and people dotting the Verdugo Valley Lines. Club members try to keep the system true to its depicted era, the 1950s.

Trains travel through scaled-down versions of Burbank and Glendale, before the Glendale (2) and Ventura (134) freeways were completed and long before the Burbank Town Center and Americana at Brand were built.

There’s even a billboard that reads, “Coming soon on this site — Downtown Burbank.”

There is also a replica version of the Tehachapi Loop, a famous, spiraling rail line that allows trains to make their way up through a steep grade. The Tehachapi Loop, located in Kern County, is a California historic landmark and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, and remains a popular attraction for “rail fans.”

“There’s a lot of scratch-built buildings and cars on the layout. A lot of talent and time that’s gone into this,” Cistone said. “And we try to keep it prototypical. We try to represent that in the scenery and the buildings and the people.”

The club’s first model railroad system — a 15-foot-by-40-foot oval layout that was built shortly after 1949 and grew to include about 2,500 feet of track — was lost when the clubhouse burned down in 1963.

The following year, rebuilding efforts began on what is the present-day clubhouse. In 1967, the club began designing a new layout and later constructing it, including the framework, tracks and miles of electrical wiring.

“We’ve been working on it continuously ever since,” Koehler said.

While Koehler worked for Southern Pacific Railroad, many of the club’s other two dozen members come from varying backgrounds.

“We have a surgeon, an IT guy. We have a guy who sells medical equipment, an accountant, a producer, a geneticist” said Cistone, a former school administrator. “There’s been a variety of people who’ve moved through it and brought their skills to the club.”