Page 10 - All Scale Rails Magazine Issue 13 March April 2017

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local areas. While the club still met and en-
joyed all of the things that modern clubs do
like films and workshops, their search for a
permanent home waged on.
Allis Station
This search came to an end in 1936 when
the club set up shop in Allis Station, an aban-
doned station of the Milwaukee Road located
at 215 East National Avenue in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. Although this location was only
supposed to be temporary, the fit was a good
one and 81 years later, the club still calls Allis
Station home. This gives the club bragging
rights as the longest running model railroad
club in the same location in the country.
In the span of six months, its members put
down 1,100 feet of track with 2,200 feet of
brass rail with 88,000 spikes being devotedly
driven into the ties at the scale of a quarter
inch to a foot. There were sixty seven switch-
es and five crossovers, all hand laid on the
layout and in March of 1937, the club opened
its door to the public for the first time.
Many of the wooden bridges and one of the
trestles was prototypically recreated for the
layout based on local structures. Likewise for
the steel bridges which had been “welded”
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with solder. Club members constructed loco-
motives and over 200 pieces of rolling stock.
The locomotives came as parts in a kit, but it
could take up to 3,000 hours to build just one!
This was serious business, a place where
women and children were only allowed in on
special exhibition days. Men in suits and hats
took turns at the control stations and it was
almost sacrilegious to move any piece of rail-
road equipment by hand; all equipment had to
be moved by electronically moving them
around the layout to their intended destination.
This was the beginning of true operations on a
model railroad in a large scale.
During exhibition nights, those operations
would have to expand to ensure the smooth
exchanges. Someone who may be a pharma-
cist or a school teacher by day was called up
to take on the obligations of a chief dispatcher
or engineer. Anywhere from twelve to fifteen
telephones were manned to relay orders and
reports of the goings-on of the railroads. One
of the primary goals of this club was to run a
miniature railroad just as the full sized real
ones ran…with timetables, schedules and by
assigning jobs like Engineer and Dispatcher to
the members. Clocks were set to “scale time”
to mimic actual time on the miniature railroad.
This is where the finer parts of model rail-
roading were nurtured. Thin strings of copper
wire dance from pole to pole, a thin layer of
plaster served as the road next to the tracks
and the scenery made from twigs and leftovers
from a local florist. Deep in the Depression,
you had to get creative. Pieces of roofing
with a gravelly surface was used for ballast.
In 1935 the Model Railroad Club of Mil-
waukee organized a National Convention to
discuss the formation of a national organiza-
tion that would be devoted to promoting stan-
dards in manufacturing of model railroad
equipment. During this convention, that took
place in Milwaukee, many visitors brought
their equipment to run on the club’s layout. It
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