Choo Choo!
That’s the sound you might hear on Thursday nights at the CSI Charter School in Penacook, where the Concord Model Railroad Club meets.
The club was incorporated in 1986 by a small group of HO-scale model railroad enthusiasts for the purpose of promoting model railroading and enjoying the fellowship of other modelers. (HO scale is 1:87 – half the size of O-scale trains, Lionels being the most common O-scale trains.) It continues today as a small, informal group of guys who like to get together and have fun with their hobby.
The club is a nonprofit, and it’s a National Model Railroad Association-affiliated club. That might sound like it could be complicated or even a bit lame, but it’s anything but. There’s no agenda, no schedule, no commitments or requirements, no real goals – other than to have fun.
Sometimes the night will be spent actually running trains around the tracks. Other times, work to the scenery is done. Sometimes, everyone just eats pizza and hangs out. It all depends on the mood of the room on a particular night.
The club has a handful of regular members – membership is pretty fluid. If somebody wants to just randomly show up one night, they’re more than welcome to, said Rich Fifield, the club’s show chairman.
The club puts on a big railroad show at Everett Arena every year – this year will be the 31st. The show will be Aug. 21 from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tickets will be $5 for adults, kids under 12 free, and a $12 maximum for a family.
The show will feature more than 50 dealers, door prizes, a food stand, operating layouts in multiple gauges and more. And it’s always a pretty big deal.
“Attendance is coming back up,” Fifield said. “The best show we ever had was a NASCAR weekend. It was a rainy Sunday. That was about 2009-2010. We had about 1,200 that weekend.”
Although the high watermark was about 1,200, Fifield said he considers about 700 to 800 people a pretty good turnout. And 700 is nothing to sneeze at, considering some people drive hours to attend.
“People come from all over, mostly Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts,” Fifield said. “One dealer even comes up from Kentucky.”
Now that’s some serious dedication.
Speaking of serious dedication, Fifield has been a member of the club since 1991. He remembers when the club used to be run out of laundromat and pizza shop basements back in the day, when there was no website, no email address to get in touch with.
Those were the good ol’ days. But Fifield will take the club’s current digs – a big classroom on the school’s third floor. The club has been meeting at the school since about 2004.
“Boy, where does the time go when you’re having fun?” Fifield said.
As fun as it may be, there is a little bit of underlying stress the club carries. The club rents the space at the school on a year-by-year basis, and there’s no telling when the deal might run out. If the school decides it needs the space, the guys could end up hopping from basement to basement again, but they hope that isn’t the case.
But if that does happen, these guys are prepared. The extremely intricate and complex railroad setup – which winds all the way around the whole classroom – was built with moving in mind. Everything is set up on lightweight tables, so the layout can be broken down in sections for easy transport. The guys had to learn this technique the hard way – the setups in the previous locations were not made to move, so transporting them was a logistical nightmare.
All in all though, it’s a pretty laid-back group with no real requirements of any kind.
If you’re interested in joining the club, check out the website, trainweb.org/cmrc/index.html. You’ll also find a calendar of upcoming events, some history of the club and contact info for some members on the site.
The club meets Thursdays from 7 to 9 p.m. It’s on the third floor and is not handicapped accessible.
