Club members may ‘play with trains’ but they’re sharing local history too

Thursday, May 17, 2018
As model versions of some of the most famous trains that rumbled through Greencastle during the Golden Age of the railroad roll along, Greencastle Parks and Recreation Director Rod Weinschenk watches them move about a temporary layout set up in the banquet room at the Putnam County Museum. Note the smoke coming from the engine of the New York Central locomotive.
Banner Graphic/Eric Bernsee

Believe it or not, the Monon, New York Central and the Pennsylvania railroads -- legendary trains that once rumbled through town, leaving a romantic legacy in their wake -- are running again in Greencastle.

Just on a smaller scale than most of us remember them.

A model railroad layout -- courtesy the Pacific and Eastern Model Railroad Club and local club member Rod Weinschenk -- has been set up in the banquet room at the Putnam County Museum (1105 N. Jackson St., Greencastle) and incorporates The Monon, New York Central and Pennsylvania into the O-scale landscape that will be on display through June 16.

Members of the railroad club will be on hand to run the trains Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with special programs featuring railroading on Tuesday, May 22 and Thursday, May 24 (both 6:30-8:30 p.m.). They hope to get people interested in model railroading and share some local history in the process.

“Greencastle has some railroad history, between The Monon Railway, the Vandalia, which is the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central, which is now CSX,” explained Weinschenk, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department director. “We’re kind of hoping to tie the whole mix together and promote the hobby.”

Weinschenk said members of the Pacific and Eastern Model Railroad Club were looking for a permanent place to set up their train layout when he pointed them to the local museum.

“Members are getting older and they wanted a new place instead of a trailer to put it in,” he said, noting that he put the club in touch with David Zeiner, another local model train enthusiast who is also a Putnam County Museum board member.

The club numbers 28 members and began mostly through a group of folks who worked for Indianapolis Power and Light. Members used to set up the layout 18-20 times a year but that dwindled to about a half-dozen last year as members aren’t physically able to travel much any more, explained longtime member Dennis Scamihorn.

So that’s how the Pacific and Eastern ended up in Greencastle.

Members say the name of the club is a variation on the Civil War-era railroad, the Atlantic and Western.

“We called it the P & E with the idea at some point we’d get a better name,” Scamihorn laughed, “but 19 years later, here we are.”

The P&E railroad once went though Crawfordsville apparently, but that was the Peoria and Eastern, and reportedly there also was a short-track railroad in California known as the Pacific and Eastern at one time.

Weinschenk said the museum exposure -- which is expected to include permanent display space once the museum takes over the southern section of its newly acquired building (the old Kroger store on North Jackson Street) in a couple of years -- could be the catalyst to rallying local model railroading enthusiasts and see if they can’t start a local branch of the club.

“One of the things I wanted to do 18 years ago when I came here was to start a club with the railroads that went through Greencastle,” noted Weinschenk who said he was introduced to model railroading 50 years ago when his dad brought out his trains and set them up in the basement of their Iowa home.

The current museum display allows club members -- who not only come from Indianapolis and Avon but also Terre Haute, Greensburg and even Illinois -- to work on their layout and expand and change it.

“You can’t improve the layout when it’s in a trailer,” Scamihorn conceded.

The two special nights of model railroading on May 22 and 24 will include the trains running, dialogue about the Greencastle railroad history, a chance to help the club make tiny trees to add to the layout scenery and a call-out for local enthusiasts to join.

“And we play trains, of course,” Scamihorn smiled.

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