Welcome to Trumansburg
A town in upstate New York is recreated full size in HO scale/ Steven Peck; with model photos by Dugan Gorman
Wearing the red, white and black livery of the 1940’s, the Lehigh Valley’s streamlined Pacific No. 2093 (right) leads the Black Dia- mond past the station at Trumansburg east- bound for Ithaca and a final destination of New York City. Here is the station at Tru- mansburg as it looked circa 1915 (below).
J
ust what is it that drives us as model railroaders? Is it the long hours of painstaking accuracy in- volved in model building? Is it the ever rising cost of the various materials in- volved? Perhaps it is the loss of sanity caused by the overwhelming desire to build a personal empire. No, I think not. Instead I think it is the memory of the sound of a locomotive blowing for a grade crossing, or the sight of one thundering past. Maybe it is riding the high iron to visit relatives or friends. Perhaps we recall the train around the Christmas tree. We each have our own personal history that pushes us to model something that no longer exists, something in our mind’s eye that we long to see so much that we will go to great lengths to recreate it. Yes, we as modelers are given a very unique op- portunity provided by our craft, pre- serving the history of the iron horse. Having been born in Bath, New York,
TRUMANSBURG HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTION: TRUMANSBURG, NY; CIRCA 1915
and living just two blocks from the Delaware Lackawanna & Western rail yards, as young as the age of four I would slip off to the yards to watch trains. I also spent many wide-eyed hours watching my brother and father build a model railroad in our basement. I moved to Trumansburg, New York, at the age of nine where my father was a photographer and journalist for the Gannett newspapers. He often took me with him to cover news stories. I felt like one of the luckiest kids on the plan-
et. However, on one particular day I wasn’t so sure. He said, “Come on Steve, let’s go take a picture of the last train out of Trumansburg.” Could this really be, just two months after moving and now living a mere quarter mile from the train yard, that I would not be able to watch my beloved trains? Well, as we waited for that last train, I told my dad that someday I would build a model of the train yards in Trumansburg so all could see what was once there. Some forty
years later and after
building several model railroads to hone my craft, I began to build that rail- road. I did not want to build just anoth- er model railroad; instead, I wanted to build one with historic accuracy and precision in order to create an exact replica of what once was. I had seen oth- er historic models but all of them had been done “loosely”–in other words leaving out crucial details or by using that sometimes necessary but always model crushing technique called com- pression. Not that this is such a bad thing. It is better than not preserving railroad history at all. Still, I wanted to make mine exceptionally accurate for an exact month, day, and year precisely as it was with no compression. I think the one thing that held me
back from starting this project was the research ahead of me. Producing the
52 JANUARY 2013
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