History buff keeps area’s past on track
I engineered interviews with model railroader Terry Hughes a month ago, looking forward to writing about his jaw-dropping layout.
But I found myself on a oneway track, listening instead to his memories of yesteryear and lamenting the loss of part of the Canadian identity.
Hughes, a history and heritage buff, said he came by his fascination with steam-powered locomotives because trains were still a big part of the local culture when he was a boy. It also helped to have a railroad man in the family.
“It was all part of my growing up,” he said in the basement of his Welland home. “My grandfather was a journeyman brakeman.”
He plied Hughes with stories about sights, sounds and experiences on the rails.
Now 78, Hughes grew up on Wallace Avenue on the city’s east side. He has fond recollections from back in the day.
When he was a kid, the big toy was an electric train set. Everybody wanted them, he said.
“When I was seven, the American Flyer (later the Lionel American Flyer) was the main toy out there. Kids at the time were taken up with railroads.”
With trains such a big part of the culture in his formative years, it’s not hard to understand Hughes becoming a model railroader.
He started as a hobbyist in 1960.
Over time, he has accumulated 25 locomotives, 250 freight cars and 15 passenger cars for his layout.
It passes through the communities of Merritton, Thorold, Port Robinson, Welland Junction (Dain City), Port Colborne, Fort Erie.
For example, in the Thorold stretch, you will see Ontario Paper Co.’s Thorold mill. If you look closely, you will see three rolls of newsprint on the loading platform, waiting to be shipped by rail to the Detroit News.
One can’t help but be impressed by a scale model of
Bridge 10 (north of Allanburg, Allanburg is Bridge 11). He began work on it three years ago. The bridge still is not finished. It has 700 pieces on the lift span alone.
Model railroading is a neverending project, Hughes said. That’s because “You’re always looking for something else.”
His layout depicts how things were in 1947.
“Nineteen-forty-seven was the year before the diesels came in. There’s nothing here but steam.”
When building the layout, Hughes had a nickname for it: Plywood Central. It was mostly plywood with the beginnings of scenery, he said.
Everything is historically accurate. He studied blueprints and visited various archives just so everything would be based on fact, not fancy.
Hughes said his main interest was locomotives.
“What I did, I took existing locomotives on the market and changed them.
“What I was looking for, locomotives that ran around here. All the locomotives you see on this layout have been altered, they are models of locomotives that ran in this area.”
He remains emotionally attached to model railroading for a simple reason: “It gives me opportunity to do something which reminds me of the time when I was a kid. I have good memories. It was a very noisy time. I liked that.”
There were early morning and late afternoon factory horns and whistles. There were sounds of trains shunting back and forth along the rails.
There were three drop forges in town, each contributing to the cacophony that was part of daily life. There was more, too.
Even from Wallace Avenue where the family lived, “At night you could hear the trains coming in from Buffalo, on the line by Mathews School.”
He reminisced, longingly at times.
There was “something special” about being able to listen to that. He loved the railroad’s influence on his life.
“That was our stimulus then. The railroad was part of our culture, ” he said.
He considers his layout’s special features will always be: the memories and nostalgia it brings, the engineering that went into building it and the research that was done to make it historically accurate.
But now the hobby that has been such a big part of his life is in decline. He said the railway no longer has the appeal to youngsters that it did in his day. He accepts that, but it doesn’t mean he likes it.
“The hobby is dying. Nowadays you have all kinds of electronics going on. Now it seems the railways aren’t part of our lives anymore, to kids the history doesn’t mean anything anymore. That’s part of the problem.”
Regardless, Hughes will continue doing his thing on the painstakingly created layout with true-to-life scenery, buildings, greenery, billboards, tracks, railway cars and locomotives in his basement. He said he owes it to this part of the Canadian identity.
“We’re (model railroaders) trying to preserve what our railway heritage was all about. The railway made our country grow, we can’t forget that.”