All aboard: Model railroads connect generations

Railroads used to crisscross Redstone Arsenal with their whistles and bells cutting through the night air. On Tuesday nights in a building, tucked in the WWII-era warehouses, the sound of train whistles and the hollers of train engineers can still be heard from behind an old, whitewashed door of building 3463.

On Tuesday nights, members of the Redstone Model Railroad Club gather to run model trains on scale-sized dioramas of Alabama railyards under fluorescent lights as reruns of M.A.S.H. play on the television.

Rick Garber, the longest-serving member of the Redstone Model Railroad Club and past president, joined in 1981.

“So, my dad got me started,” Garber said as an HO scale train passed behind him. “I’ve had trains since I was 5 years old.

“It’s a lifelong hobby. When you get to retirement age, you want to have something to do. With model railroading, you can wear every engineering hat – civil, mechanical, electrical, pick an engineering discipline and you will use that skill set in model railroading.

“I’m retired Air Force,” he said. “That’s another thing about the club, you have a lot of retires, and former government, DOD and NASA guys.

“I was stationed in Montgomery with the Air Force, and I was a member of a railroad club in Prattville. When I got out of the Air Force and came to Huntsville, the first thing I looked for was a railroad club and found this one on Redstone Arsenal.”

The model railroad club brings members together with their interest in railroads, but each member brings a different skill set which allows the club to tackle large projects like the large diorama as well as movable model railroad teaching diorama for kids.

“HO scale is a good scale for inside a building,” Harley Goble, past president, said. “It’s a good scale for starting out for kids. This club is very concerned about bringing young people in.”

“You have disciplines that you can bring whatever hobby you have into model railroading,” Mike Mittlebeeler, the current president, said. “You can have electronic projects or the computer aspect, you can download real sounds and make the trains sound real. There are crafty people who just like building buildings or doing the scenery. I’m a history buff, so I made a little German town.”

Harley Goble Jr., retired Army, was president of the club 20 years ago. Goble discovered a family Army connection to model railroading.

“I retired from the Army after 24 years, and my father served in WWII in combat and Korea,” he said. “My father died in combat when I was 10.

“When I was little, we would set up the Lionel trains at Christmastime. We had three layers of trains. It was really neat,” Goble said.

“Later, I found out that my father served as a steam locomotive engineer in combat. He went from England to France, and he ran a steam locomotive in combat,” he said. “Of course, the Germans were aiming for the engines. If you hit the engine, you stop the train.

“He belonged to a railroad command, and I never knew it. That’s one of my connections. It keeps me connected with my father.”

The diorama in building 3463 depicts a Birmingham railyard, and there’s a diorama of the Anniston Army Depot railyard.

“The Redstone Railroad Modeling Club has been on the Arsenal since the ‘60s,” Garber said. “This is our third building. The first building got condemned and torn down.

“The second building, if you remember the super outbreak of tornadoes in 1974, our building was the only one destroyed on the Arsenal. The third building is still standing with a life-size railroad crossing sign hanging by the front door.”

In the time since the tornado destroyed the railroad set, there have been quantum leaps in model railroad technology and changes to the club’s sets.

“There’s been a lot of changes in how the hobby works,” Garber said. “You hear all the noise of the trains? There are sound systems in these trains now. Everything has gone digital. This railroad, from the first day, was built with all those digital features. The old layout was the old DC-style (direct current style). They realized that was going to be difficult to upgrade it to the new stuff. So, we decided to tear it all out. We cut it all up with saws and threw it out. We had an empty building for three years.”

In 2006, the first piece of new track was laid, and the club had the first loop running by 2008.

While acknowledging it’s an old man’s hobby, Mittlebeeler said kids still love to see the model trains running.

“Kids want to see a layout that’s running,” he said. “We made a module set that we can take to different events, and then we have a working layout. It’s been awesome. The kids’ faces are great. You have kids show up in engineer coveralls in hats, and they have questions about trains.”

Mittlebeeler welcomes everyone out to just watch or get involved in the Redstone Model Railroad Club. Information is available on the website at rmrrc.net/.

“Anyone can bring anything they have to run on our layout,” Garber said. “We actually have a computer set up here with software that we can program their engines for our track system.”

“We’re here every Tuesday at 6:30 (p.m.),” Mittlebeeler said. “On the first and the third Tuesday, we have a run night. On the second and fourth, we are doing maintenance on the trains and the track. If we have a fifth Tuesday, it’s a run night. You don’t need any experience or know anything about model trains; just come out here and jump into it.”