In a converted pig sty at the edge of town, there’s a (mostly) working model of the CN railway from Barrie to Meaford – the ongoing work of a group of guys known as the Nottawasaga Model Railway Club.
They’re model citizens with an intricate knowledge of a very specific part of Collingwood during a very specific era. The multi-level diorama is a scene from 1955 when steam engines and diesel locomotives shared the tracks.
It’s a mostly accurate depiction of the towns the train passed through, albeit some creative liberties were taken. Collingwood’s town hall faces the wrong way, and flies flags that weren’t made in the 1950s. But that’s the prerogative of the modeller who built the town hall, Jay Parkes.
The train begins in Barrie at the Allandale station, where a donated replica of the roundhouse and turntable from Allandale station in 1957 will soon be added.
The whole diorama is built onto a hand-made bench that’s topped with plywood and then with foam to deaden sounds. The tracks are raised and glued down in sections, and the switches are handmade, and operated by a remote-controlled internal network.
The train route is a little out of order, but the trains chug through Angus, Stayner, Thornbury, Collingwood, Meaford. The weather changes along the route - fall in Collingwood, winter in Meaford.
In Thornbury, there’s a model of the fish ladder. In Collingwood, the shipyards are still open and functioning. That’s where the sheer leg is installed, made by Bill Payne, an original 40-year member of the Nottawasaga Model Railway Club.
The sheer leg was a special crane used to load boilers and engines into ships after they were launched. Payne’s model has electronic parts making it move like the original would have. It’s set up behind a pristine and well-lit Collingwood Terminals Ltd. building and a model of Hull #172 Black Bay, which was built in Collingwood in 1962.
Some of the structures are built and painted with existing materials, others have been 3-D printed and painted by the model club members. There are backdrops printed with local photos from the Collingwood museum collection, and little corn fields, wheat fields and apple orchards meticulously glued down into the scenes.
This “permanent” installation has occupied the time and attention of club members for the last six or seven years or so. There are 18 members in the club, which has existed for the last 40 years.
Some members work on the permanent installation – Parkes puts in hours daily – and others work on mobile models. The mobile installations are two-foot-by-four-foot sections that can be connected or stand-alone and displayed at various locations, including the window at Collingwood’s town hall.
Parkes, an electrical engineer by trade, has enjoyed building model train scenes on-and-off for much of his life. When he moved to Collingwood he re-started the hobby on a small scale, and now his basement in his Georgian Meadows home is “full of stuff.”
“My COVID life was saved because of having something to do,” said Parkes.
He now spends about “200 million” hours a week working on a model. He visits the clubhouse at Bygone Days almost every day to work on the permanent installation.
“Everybody seems to have a different interest,” said Parkes. “I like to do the scenery stuff, for example, the trees and the landscaping and stuff like that. But other people like to do repairs to the locomotives, and I wouldn’t know how to do that if it smacked me on the side of the head.”
Bruce Bowles has been a member of the club for about six years, and got his start when he was a kid and his dad set up a four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood in their basement to build models on. He spends his time at the clubhouse “fixing things.”
The trains are propelled along the tracks because they are electrified by wires running underneath the model. Those get bumped or unplugged often while someone is working on a new section. So there’s always something to fix.
The club is looking for new members and also hoping to show off the permanent display as it nears completion with open houses every Friday in November. The open houses take place from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday evenings at the clubhouse at Bygone Days Heritage Village on Sixth Street past Fisher Fields, everyone is welcome.
Membership is $140 for the year, and the club meets twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays at 1 p.m.
For more information or to reach out to the club, visit their Facebook page.
