Rensselaer Model Railroad Society Anniversaries

1997 is the 50th anniversary of the club, and the 25th anniversary of the club in these quarters, the current NEB&W. What kind of plans do you have for the celebration? Basically trying to get together all the old members and have them come back. The anniversary is actually over a full year because of the two different dates, one in June when we moved here, and November when the club started. So we haven't really figured out exactly what we're doing in terms of that, other than using it as something to tie into getting things done on the layout, and getting excitement about the layout.

Well, will there be special articles in the hobby press? Yeah, and there have been already: "The Great Model Railroads" and "Mainline Modeler Series." And "Model Railroader." 50 years is a long time for anything, particularly a club. How has the club managed to stay together through 50 years? I think that having a space and a facility is something that you can't start a second club or something. Space is always a problem for model railroads, and having been blessed with this amount of space has kept the club here.

And then focusing on the prototypes so that we don't change as interests change. We had someone who modeled New Haven, and we had a lot of New Haven features, and then he left and we started modeling Denver and Rio Grande, or something. So this really keeps us focused on one thing. We got a one time grant from New York Parks Recreation and Historic Preservation to work on the exhibitry. And we're tied into the tourist attractions, so when they send out notices about what's going on, they're supposed to be including us.

Oh 'cause you're duplicating Troy, is that the... Right. And they recognize we get a lot of visitors from outside of the area, so they always like that. It's interesting getting people in here. You get a lot of questions from people, and some of the times they go from they have no idea of what's going on, and on the other hand you also get people come in and they say, "I lived in this house." Gee.

"And this is the color of the house." Or, "Here's a story about what happened. I remember the train going through, and it used to do this at this time of night," or whatever. And so it brings it to life. Well, how much of that can you actually say is true? People tell you things and their memories may be faulty, they may embellish it.

Well, you... Would you go and change something based on a story? We changed the color of the house, specifically. You did? The guy said it was white, we had painted it yellow 'cause that's what it is now, we painted it back to white, because that was the best information we had.

Whether or not it's true, it's the best and if he changes his mind, we'll change the color.