ON TRACK I FEATURE
From a railcar used for marketing to his impressive model collection, Gord Chaplin finds trains hard to resist
Gord Chaplin has longtime fascination with trains.
WHEN GORD CHAPLIN sold off his childhood train collection in the 1950s, he assumed it was gone forever.
But nearly 20 years later, when he had a child of his own, Chaplin and his legion of long-lost locomotives were reunited. And one might say his fascination with trains has been on track ever since.
It all began with a handful of model trains and a few feet of track – a Christmas gift to the five-year-old Chaplin from his father. Every year, the young boy’s set would grow a little bigger, his interest a little keener.
By the time Chaplin hit adolescence and his family moved to a smaller home, however, the collection no longer fit in a single room and remained packed away in boxes. It was also about that time when Chaplin began to outgrow his childhood hobby and took to new interests. “When I got to be about 16 and got my driver’s licence, I learned there were girls around and there was a car to take them out in,” jokes Chaplin, now 72, from the living room of his riverside condo in Galt. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do with all these trains?’ If you don’t store them in a climate-controlled room, they’ll deteriorate.
“So I sold it all to a gentleman and that was the end of it.” Only it wasn’t. Nearly two decades later, when Chaplin’s own son was about five years old, he got >>
>> to thinking about that old model train set and decided he’d try to track it down. As it turned out, the Chaplin family’s former housekeeper – by then retired – happened to still know the buyer.
“Long story short,” Chaplin says, “I phoned the guy and said, ‘Do you remember I sold you those trains all those years ago?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ve still got them.’ He was very abrupt with me.
“So I say, ‘You wouldn’t want to sell them back by any chance, would you?’ ”
The buyer, who had apparently never developed much of an attachment to them, agreed.
“They were still in the same boxes and the same newspaper wrapping as they were when I sold them to him,” Chaplin recalls, shaking his head. “He never even took them out of the boxes.”
Like his father before him, Chaplin presented the set to his son on a cold Christmas morning. And like his father before him, he continued adding to the collection every year.
In fact, even after his son reached adulthood and flew the coop, Chaplin sent away for pieces from mail order catalogues and frequented hobby shops from Cambridge to Toronto looking for new additions.
“It grew bigger and bigger and bigger,” Chaplin says. “By that time we were in a bigger house and there was lots of room to display it.” And display it he did. The hundreds of engines and railcars and cabooses, complemented by a detailed backdrop of authentic urban scenery, coasted through the family home, cutting through walls and spanning entire rooms.
But intense as Chaplin’s infatuation with trains had become – and colossal and all-encompassing his collection – he was just getting started.
Nearly two years after he and his wife, Celia, moved into the corner unit of a modern condo development in the heart of Galt, the view from Chaplin’s 11th floor balcony still takes his breath away.
“It’s beautiful out here,” he says, his palms resting on the railing overlooking the glinting waters of the Grand River. “Sometimes I’ll just come out here and watch the birds and listen to the quiet.”
Chaplin points out the array of historical landmarks beyond his sliding back door with a tinge of hometown pride.
To the north sits the hulking CP rail bridge spanning the river, to the south a smattering of rustic downtown rooftops. And there, between a pair of piercing church spires, a squat brown brick building that formerly served as the factory for Canadian General-Tower, the manufacturing company owned by the Chaplin family
for more than a century. Sold in 2012 to a Burlington-based investment company, Canadian General-Tower produced plastics and vinyls used in everything from car parts to swimming pool liners. Chaplin, who worked there for more than 40 years, retired about five years ago.
“I started in sales and marketing,” he says. “By the time I was finished I’d cut the grass, I’d cleaned the washrooms, I’d worked on all the machinery.” Growing up in the shadows of a long line of local industrialists, Chaplin’s path was pre-determined, his future forged by heredity and tradition.
As a 10-year-old boy – like his father, his cousins and his brother before him – he was shipped off to study at Ridley College, a private boarding school in St. Catharine’s. From there, it was straight to a reputable university – Nova Scotia’s Acadia, in Chaplin’s case – before finally returning home to learn the ropes and climb the ladder of the successful family business. But instead of begrudging his fate, Chaplin embraced it. “Being a family business, it allowed me to do a lot of things that, had I been working for somebody else, I wouldn’t have been able to do outside of work,” he says.
In addition to travelling the world and owning the Cambridge Hornets of the Ontario Hockey Association for a few seasons, he bought an old caboose which he furnished and parked on the tracks of a property he owned. “We used it as a sort of boys’ club,” says Chaplin, smiling at the memories. “I called it a poor man’s Pullman.”
Later, in 1988, he took his fascination with trains to a whole new level when he persuaded his brother – the other shareholder in Canadian General-Tower at the time – to buy a railcar. “I always thought a private railway car would be a wonderful thing to have,” says Chaplin. “I finally convinced him that if we could get the right one, we could use it for entertaining customers and also move it around to market our products.” >>
>> After purchasing a railcar formerly used by the Florida East Coast Railway for $130,000, the Chaplin brothers poured another $500,000 into renovations and upgrades.
By the time it was finished, the car had a fully stocked kitchen, sleeping quarters and a boardroom complete with a table that folded into the wall. The company used the mobile lounge to host catered cocktail parties and travelled to conventions from New Jersey to Phoenix.
“It was a lovely place to sit back and watch the world go by, which we did,” says Chaplin, who would arrange to hitch the car to the back of passenger trains at Union Station in Toronto. “We had a lot of neat trips on it.”
The joyrides came to an end in 1995, however, when the company could no longer justify the maintenance costs.
“Every 40,000 miles or X number of years, it had to be completely torn down and the wheels looked at for cracks and all that kind of stuff,” Chaplin explains. “We asked what that would cost and they said probably another couple hundred thousand dollars.”
While the pricey pill of keeping the railcar was too hard to swallow, Chaplin continued building his model train collection and adding artifacts to his ever-growing shrine of railway memorabilia.
And he still looks for any excuse to combine his fervour for trains and travel. This fall he plans to visit York, England – the “mecca for train freaks” – as part of a vacation that will also take him to the American East Coast.
“It’s something I’ve loved, something I’ve been passionate for as far back as I can remember,” says Chaplin of his lifelong fixation. “I hope there are many more trains and many more travels in my future.”
When he’s not staring out at the flitting birds or the flowing river from his sky-high balcony, Chaplin can likely be found in the carpeted space on the opposite side of his living room.
Spread out across a massive platform of elevated plywood, lining three entire walls and occupying the bulk of the room, sits his pride and joy. While it’s only about a quarter of his total collection – and it no longer goes through walls – his train set is an impressive specimen.
The oval track, connected in the centre by a custom-handcrafted drawbridge, spans a total circumference of more than 20 feet and surrounds a city complete with stations, businesses and restaurants. The walls bordering the miniature city are plastered with images of rolling mountains, bright blue sky, cotton-white clouds and a busy downtown skyline.
The focal point of the scene is a vintage roundhouse, traditionally used to service, store and rotate locomotives.
“I like to model after the railroads which became Consolidated Rail,” Chaplin says. “They all merged into one because they
were all failing; I like those old fallen flags.” Higher up the wall, calendars, paintings and photographs hang from hooks like framed portraits in a history museum. A glass case exhibits an assortment of china from old dining cars and shelves display relics ranging from railway lanterns to faded ticket stubs. The crowning jewel of the collection, however, is an old enamel sign, the word “Galt” stenciled in black capital letters across the faded white background. It once identified the old Canadian National Grand Trunk Railway station in downtown Cambridge, which closed in the late 1960s and was eventually demolished. Before the old brick and stone building was torn down, however, Chaplin took home a memento. “One night, my friend and I decided it would be a good idea to go get it and give it a better home,” Chaplin says of the sign, which is now suspended in the centre of the wall above his train set.
Standing in the midst of his pet project, which remains nameless but is set “somewhere between 1940 and 1950,” Chaplin says that while he has an eye for authenticity, he’s not nearly as obsessive as other train enthusiasts.
“I would fall very much in the generalist core,” says Chaplin, who estimates the value of his entire collection somewhere north of $100,000. “One friend of mine would go through catalogues just to see how those trains were put out in 1954 and what car was in what order. I just don’t have the time or patience for that.
“The other thing about some modelers is that they’re perfectionists and everything has to be to scale,” he adds. “If you look at the railway I have, some of the crossing gates are higher than the locomotives, but I like that kind of funky look. I mix and match everything.”
While Chaplin doesn’t plan to add many more pieces, he is in the process of installing an elevated line modelled after Chicago’s iconic railway system and sprucing up his scenery with help from Celia, who he says possesses an artistic streak and an eye for detail.
“There will be a line straight across the city, like a streetcar kind of thing, and then there will be an inter-urban that runs right around the city and has two stations and steps coming down,” says Chaplin, as he picks up the manual control lever. “Then, when the elevated line is done, we can do more scenery, which is the fun part.”
In a slow, fluid motion he pushes down on the lever and the engine stirs to life, complete with a chorus of bells and whistles. The long line of multi-coloured railcars begins to inch forward, their wheels grinding against the tracks with a guttural growl.
“I think it’s important to keep collections like this going,” he says, raising his voice above the rumble of the locomotive, which is beginning to pick up speed. “There’s a lot of memories right here.
“It’s a piece of history.”