Railroad club gets new members

It's basically a little training to build little train buildings and the Paradise Center Railroad Club's two newest members are jumping right in to help with the center's railroad display.

Plains residents Laura (McClenahan) Wood and Andy Gonzalez recently joined the club to help construct the assortment of model buildings that made up the town of Paradise and the railroad station. "I knew they needed all the help they could get and since I'm on the board I thought I should help," said Wood, who started with the tie plant's coal bin building last Wednesday and already has the floor and walls up and has started working on the siding and windows. Gonzalez's first building was a four-inch-long replica of the tie plant's motor shed and welding shop. He also had the basic frame done, but decided to help Wood with the windows of the coal bin Wednesday at the most recent workshop put on by Mac Hall, who is heading the display project with Dave Colyer. Wood and Gonzalez also affixed thin pieces of foam core to the bottom of their structures to represent the building's foundation.

Neither of them have experience making model buildings. Gonzalez said he made model cars and planes when he was a boy, but never made anything like the display type objects. His first building will involve installing three windows, a door and a roll-up door on one end. "I like doing this. It takes a lot of patience, but it's fun," said Gonzalez, who is actually working at the site of where the real tie plant in Paradise was situated. Three days a week, he pumps creosote from underground pools and puts it in hazardous material containers. It's an operation that he feels will probably take years. He's doing the same thing in Somers.

He said he's helping with the railroad project in support of the Paradise Center, where he's already volunteered with other projects and donated some of his photographs. "It's a way for me to apply my mechanical skills and to give back to the community," said Gonzalez.

"We're making headway," Hall said of the railroad display. Hall has some 60 years of model railroading and heads the workshops on Wednesday evenings. "It's a lot of fun, but it's frustrating, too," he said, mainly because of the size and needed detailing of the buildings in order to make them look authentic.

Others assisting with the buildings include: Colyer, John Thorson, Kathleen Hubka, Marc Childress and Terry Christensen, who is mostly working on the display's train roundhouse at his home. Most of the buildings will be made from foam core or a type of poster board, along with plastic and paper parts, said Colyer. They are using cards from the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association in an effort to make the building colors historically correct.

The railroad display takes up more than half of one of the old classrooms on the main floor of the old schoolhouse and consists of two tabletop exhibits, one of the tie plant, which will include about 20 work buildings and railroad staff residential buildings, and will be designed to look like it was in the 1970s. The larger display table will show the town of Paradise, the roundhouse and a few other railroad structures. It is the larger of the two display tables and will probably have around 50 buildings. Its setting will be of the 1930s, said Hall. 

The project began nearly six years ago and includes several HO scale model trains and about 70 feet of track, including one that loops around the mountains. Volunteers are now concentrating on railroad structures at the tie plant. Colyer, the center's vice president, is nearly finished with the 21.5-inch-long retort structure, the main tie plant building, which stands seven inches tall at the highest peak. He plans to experiment with old photographic negatives to simulate windows of the retort building. He also plans to place two cylinders in the building that will be made of copper, as will the dome-shaped doors. It might even have lights inside. It was Colyer who came up with the idea of using two vehicle oil filters for tanks that held the railroad station's creosote and oil supply. The most recent building Colyer was working on was the station's cook shack, where his grandfather, Pat Cox, worked in the 1920s. Colyer and his father, Jerry, worked at the tie plant before it burned down in 1982.

Colyer and Hall decided to create the Paradise Center Railroad Club last November to try to get more volunteers to work on the display. Others have helped with different parts of the display. Karen Thorson and Judy Christensen are placing thousands of trees on the mountainside. Cheri Seli took the photo that is the background behind the town. Several worked on the Styrofoam mountains that serve as the display background. Terry Christensen will be building the Paradise Elementary School, which was built in 1910 and is now the Paradise Center.

Hall said the display might take a couple years to complete, primarily because of the detail work involved, volunteer time and the need for money to purchase tools and supplies. They want it to look as authentic as possible. "It's not just any place, this is a place, so we have an obligation to replicate it the best we can," said Karen Thorson, a professional artist and the center's secretary. 

Benita Jo Hanson, who wrote a book on the Paradise railroad, has done extensive research to help the volunteers make the buildings authentic. Thorson said there will essentially be three kinds of visitors -casual lookers, railroad history buffs and train modelers, which will be the most critical of the display, according to Hall, who said the display will include miniature people. Like some of the building kits that will be tweaked to look like actual structures of the time at Paradise, he has an HO scale man with a pick that he plans to modify to be holding a pickaroon, a tool railroaders used to pick up ties.

"This is fun," Cook said as she worked on her coal bin building. It's going to be awesome when it's done. I think it's going to mean more to the people of this area," she said.

The club has received a few donations to help pay for modeling implements, but more would help, said Colyer. Some of the volunteers have purchased tools on their own, but some can be expensive. Those who would like to help can send donations to the Paradise Center, Box 162, Paradise, MT 59856. Anyone wishing to help with building the display can show up Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m. at the center, or call and leave a message at the center at (406)826-5003.