Building a collection

A childhood gift turned into a lifelong passion for the leader of Lorain City Council.

Joel Arredondo, 70, is in his fifth term as Lorain City Council president.

For years Arredondo has worked in car sales, but he also is a collector and aficionado of trains, model and lifesize.

When Arredondo was 10, his father, Apolinar, got him a Lionel train set for Christmas.

“I had put that on my wish list,” Arredondo said. “Back in the day, a family of seven, dad being a steelworker, mom staying at home, you’re kind of limited to one, maybe two gifts, but usually one gift.

“I was very surprised when I did get the gift,” he said.

As a child he did not think much about the economics of the family, but the Lionel train was a big investment for the time, Arredondo said.

The family lived in a duplex, so train time was limited to the Christmas season. When the family moved to a larger house, he set up a 4-foot-by-8-foot train layout.

As the boys got older, some friends would find ways to blow up their toy trains with firecrackers or BB guns, Arredondo said. He kept his Lionel train stayed together because he appreciated the investment and the gift.

When they became teenagers, many boys lost interest in their trains as they learned more about sports and girls, said Arredondo, a 1965 graduate of the former Admiral King High School.

He went on to study history and Spanish at Kent State University and started working after graduation.

Arredondo was in his 20s when he and a friend went to his first train show.

He was hooked again, with lifelong friend and fellow train collector John Klinar there to help. Arredondo and his wife, Joyce, got married in 1982. Before the wedding she bought the house that would become their home on Allison Avenue, and there was room for tracks.

Arredondo built an 8- by 12-foot platform. They did not nail it together; instead they screwed the pieces together so it would be easy to disassemble after the holidays.

“It took us 30 days, a whole month, to build it,” he said. “After we did that, I said I’m not going to take this apart now. So 35 years later it’s still up, it’s still running.”

The trains became a centerpiece for family visits during the holidays. His own children, son Andy and daughter Mia, would run it, along with his adult siblings and their children.

“Frankly speaking probably the adults got more fun out of it than the kids did,” Arredondo said. “They liked to go down and run the trains.”

Once his son was born, Arredondo began collecting in earnest. He bought his son a train set every year and, when his daughter was born, sought out one of Lionel’s pastel colored “girl” trains that came out in limited editions over the years.

The Corner Store, a former shop on Colorado Avenue, was a local seller for Lionel trains, and there Arredondo found his Lionel ZW transformer, the power unit that controls electricity to his four-track set. He bought it used but 25 years later it still runs strong, he said.

Along with his first boyhood model train, Arredondo owns more than 30 engines and at least 200 cars, displayed in cases built on the walls of his train room and two other rooms.

“All of them have been run at least once,” he said. “I’ve got friends of mine, collectors, they leave them in the box. They never run them.”

His children sometimes would help build model houses for the train layouts, Arredondo said. When they traveled, souvenirs would supplement the trains, such as lobster traps from Boston or cannon from Gettysburg, he said. find train rides on vacation.

Arredondo has a dream list spanning North America: Copper Canyon in Mexico, and in Canada from Toronto to Montreal to Quebec.

“The big one: I still haven’t ridden an Amtrak,” he said with a laugh.