Clickety-clacks and the occasional whistle ring through the Danville air as trains pass by homes, churches, lumber mills and livestock pens, over bridges and along hillsides.
It’s 1950s America, and people unload luggage at train stations and drop ice blocks into train cars to keep en-route produce cold.
Kids play on tire swings near ponds as the train rumbles by. A woman sweeps the front porch of her home, which is surrounded by a tidy fence.
But the woman is less than an inch tall, and the fence is made of matchsticks with the heads cut off.
At the Danville Model Railroad Club, more than 500 feet of track winds through intricate scenery at about waist-height against a backdrop of blue skies and clouds painted on the wall.
Few people have ever seen the track, called a layout, which is the longest model railroad layout in Virginia.
Members of the club say it’s been called Danville’s “best kept secret,” even though it’s been in existence for almost 50 years and meets twice a week in a city building.
“We don’t want it to be a secret,” said Bert Osborne, one of only two living founding club members.
Osborne, at 88 years old, was at the first meeting held in 1977 to gauge public interest. He’s seen the model railroad club evolve since then to include younger members, expand its space at the City Auditorium and work toward becoming a nonprofit.
Cleon Ross, the club’s president, said previous leaders wanted to keep the club exclusive, which meant it wasn’t well-known.
“We’re dismantling that,” he said.
The model railroad club is more than a hobby, Ross said.
It provides members with knowledge of the American railroad industry, and it teaches both patience and skills, since model railroads require electric, construction and carpentry work.
Members either bring their own engine or use the club’s engines and run them on the layout — the track that winds through a space halfway between the fourth and fifth floors of the auditorium.
The layout is 1/87th the scale of a real railroad, and the trains run according to real-life speed on this scale. If it were scaled up to actual proportions, the layout is equivalent to 400 miles.
It takes about 20 minutes for a train to run the length of the track, which is 535 feet long.
“It’s not a toy,” Ross said. “If you talk about toy trains, those are the ones you put around the Christmas tree. Ours is prototypical, which means that it can actually run, and it can pick up cars and drop them off, like a real railroad.”
Next year will be the club’s 50th anniversary, and it’s more alive than ever.
These aren’t the trains that ‘your father grew up with’
The club meets twice a week on the fourth-and-a-half floor of the City Auditorium.
On Mondays and Thursdays, the club’s members, both young and old, get together to run trains. They also talk business, catch up on life and expand their history knowledge and skill sets.
In a conference room on the fourth floor of the building, “we sit and try to solve all of the world’s ills,” Ross said. “Well, at least all of the city’s ills.”
On a March Thursday, Ross sat with the club’s treasurer, John Whitmire; its librarian and historian, Jim Curran; and Allan Jones, former chairman of the board, who said he’s held “just about every office” at the club over the years.
Later, they are joined by Osborne, the only living founding member of the club who still lives in Danville. The other is in Florida, he said.
When they’re done talking — if they’re done talking — they can climb a flight of stairs to a space that’s halfway between the fourth and fifth floors of the City Auditorium to the layout room and run engines.
“Model trains now are not like what your father grew up with,” Ross said. “That was AC, which means that they flipped a switch and the train went. And if you stopped the switch, it stopped.”
Today, the model railroad club uses trains with electric motors to drive the engines.
There’s a small computer chip in each engine called a DCC, or digital command control, though each engine is controlled individually.
“We’ve had as many as 21 running simultaneously,” Ross said.
By participating in the club, members can learn about the nation’s railroad history, which is “what allowed America to grow,” Ross said. “It never would’ve happened the way it did, not without the railroad.”
They also get a strong sense of community, because the club is like a family, said many members. Before Thursday meetings, members go to dinner together, rotating between four of their favorite Danville restaurants — a local Mexican restaurant, a local Italian restaurant, a local seafood and steak restaurant and a sports bar chain.
This is a far cry from how the club dynamic used to be, which was territorial and exclusive, Ross said. That has changed over time.
“We’re past that stage,” he said. “We sent all those people to their great reward. We prayed hard and God called them. What it is is what it is.”
Now, older members are excited to bring younger members into the club and pass along their knowledge.
Osborne, who said he’s been in love with model railroads since he was 9 years old, just retired as club secretary after 30 years.
“The old guard is getting to the point where we need to transfer some of the responsibility to the younger folks,” he said.
The layout: 500 feet of track and 900 feet of scenery
The City Auditorium, where the club meets, was built in the 1930s and was once also the City Armory. The space where the model railroad club now meets used to be showers and dressing rooms, Ross said.
When he got involved with the club around 2000, after moving to the area from New England, the layout “had gone past its prime time,” he said.
Club members decided to take it down, and when Ross joined, members were in the process of tearing out the showers to expand the space.
They were working nearly every night to get it done, including Saturdays.
“The building is solid cement, steel in all the walls,” Ross said. “We would take sledgehammers and beat on those walls. … At night we would load the chunks of cement into buckets and each person would carry a bucket down the stairs, out to a dumpster, dump it, bring the bucket home with him, bring it back, and do the same thing the next night.”
The current layout in the expanded space took a little over 24 years to complete, he said.
Now, the club layout winds through the room at about waist-height, with mouse door-shaped openings through walls for the trains to run through.
The scenery is incredibly detailed, with the walls painted (by the club members) to look like the sky behind the track. The trains cross bridges over rivers and pass rocky cliffsides, and all of the cars, people and buildings are set in 1950s America.
It’s all inspired by real-life train operations, and it’s all made by hand.
“In the ’50s, all produce had to be shipped with real ice, so the railroad shipped the ice,” Ross said. “They had [icing platforms] in every major area where they loaded trains.”
Tiny men are frozen in action, loading tiny ice blocks onto the model trains. In the livestock pens, tiny cows feed in a grassy area after being loaded off the train.
“There are 650 tree stumps, which each need four coats of different paint,” Ross said. “I know that because I did it.”
The club just got new rubber flooring, which helps absorb sound as well as the dust and dirt that are common in old buildings. Dust is “the enemy of electric railroads, because it breaks up the current,” Ross said.
The walls of the room are adorned with railroad history — like a brick from the original Danville train station and historic railroad signs — photographs and newspaper clippings, and a plaque dedicated to a young member of the club who was killed in a car accident last year.
Everyone has a different preference about what style of train they like to run, said Curran, who is from Colorado.
“Everybody runs the trains they’ve got,” he said. “We’ve got some guys that do modern stuff, and we don’t pick at that. A lot of people run Southern, a lot of people run Norfolk & Western. I run more of the Colorado stuff.”
Ross said he likes to run military trains so that other members’ trains have to move out of the way for him, according to the rules of a real railroad.
That was originally Whitmore’s idea, Whitmore made sure to mention.
Most members of the club have layouts at home, too, and they bring their own engines to meetings to run on the club track.
There are kits for model railroad scenery, but some people, like Curran, freelance layout buildings and features. He made most of the buildings for the current layout.
“There’s so much that goes into it,” Curran said. “With the construction, you get into carpentry, electrical, building scenery.”
At home, Curran has a setup that’s a complete prototype of a town in Colorado.
The club layout has one building created with a kit, which is “pretty close” to an accurate model of the train station in Chatham. The rest is unique to the club.
Another layout at the Danville Science Center used to belong to a club member, Ross said. It was donated upon his death, but it hasn’t run in about four years.
“It needs a lot of TLC,” Ross said. “Over the years, no one knew about cleaning the track and taking care of the engines. We agreed to go in and revitalize. We’re talking about changing the track there, because it’s old and it’s not working. And we’re doing that as an add-on to our work here, to help the community get that up and running.”
Looking to the future, full steam ahead
The first meeting held to gauge interest in the Danville Model Railroad Club was at the YMCA in 1977. Those who attended were regular customers of a local hobby shop that sold kits and materials for model railroads.
Osborne was among the about two dozen people who were there, he recalls, and “that was enough to get a club started.”
Back in the day, the club’s members were mostly working professionals, like doctors and lawyers, said Osborne, who is a retired dentist.
Today, the club is open to all professions and ages.
But because the space isn’t ADA accessible — there’s just one steep staircase up to the fourth-and-a-half floor — the club can’t advertise that it’s “open to the public,” Ross said.
Still, anyone who is interested in joining can contact the club, see the space and become a member. The club also welcomes junior members, Osborne said, and has had kids as young as 10 years old participate.
The club has 29 active members who pay yearly dues, and 11 lifetime members — folks older than 70 who no longer have to pay dues.
“There’s a lot of younger members now, which is a good thing,” Ross said. “At one time our average age was 68, and now it’s 31.”
Buddy Nolen, 22, first heard about the club years ago from his grandmother, who had a friend who was a member. He remembers going to a club meeting when he was a kid.
As the years passed, he got back into the hobby, Nolen said. So he sent an email, toured the space and decided to join.
“I just like building things,” he said. “Anything from models with the railroad club to cars, I just like to work with my hands.”
Nolen has a layout at home that takes up about half of his bedroom, he said.
“I bought it on Facebook Marketplace. It’s 4 feet by 8 feet,” Nolen said. “I’ve got a little bit of floor space, and then my bed and the layout.”
Dylan Seay, who is also 22, said he learned about the club from Osborne, whom he calls “Doc.” Osborne and Seay’s father knew each other through dentistry, he said.
“I’m the young gun and also the 3D printer,” said Seay, who has created holders for the train controllers with a 3D printer.
People also find out about the club through Danville’s yearly holiday light show, where the club has set up a layout for the past five years.
This garners donations, which, with the member dues, fund the club, Ross said. Its yearly budget is about $3,500, he said.
To encourage more donations, the club is working to obtain nonprofit status, he said.
“People are donating more than we’ve ever seen before,” Ross said. “If we could give a nonprofit receipt, it would make businesses more apt to give.”
Becoming a nonprofit will necessitate a club name change, he said, because “you can’t go from a corporation to a nonprofit-corporation without changing your name.” Soon, the club will be known as the Danville-Pittsylvania Model Railroad Club, which Ross hopes will invite folks from the broader region to join.
“We’re in the midst of that change, and we’re also redoing our charter and our bylaws,” he said. “So at almost 50 years, we’re sitting down and saying, ‘let’s reinvent the wheel a little bit to make it easier for newer members.’”
One thing that won’t change is the tight-knit dynamic of the club, said Glenn Ellis, the vice president.
“I don’t have children personally, but these young ones, they’re like kids to me,” he said.
Whitmore recalled his open-heart surgery a few years ago, saying that the only time his wife let him out of her sight was when he was with another model railroad club member.
Ross said that the club truly feels like a family, and he’s been part of other clubs in other states where that hasn’t been the case.
“We’re a family, and like family, we don’t always agree with each other,” Ross said. “We get mad at each other, we give the dickens to each other, then we apologize and then we fight again. The strange thing is, there isn’t one of us that wouldn’t go over fire to help the other if they needed it under any circumstances. That’s unique in our club.”
If you’d like to get involved with the Danville Model Railroad Club or donate, you can email info@dmrrclub.org or call or text 434-359-1275. You can also visit the club’s Facebook page.
All of the scenery along the layout is handmade. This fence was created with matchsticks. Photo by Grace Mamon. 
Trains carrying livestock have to stop and unload them so the animals can feed, which is replicated here. Photo by Grace Mamon. 
The track runs past several industries, like a lumber yard and a coal mine. Photo by Grace Mamon. 
There are over 500 feet of track in the space, and over 900 additional feet of scenery. Photo by Grace Mamon. 
Figurines at a train station carry luggage and wait for their trains. Photo by Grace Mamon. 
The model railroad is 1/87th the scale of a real railroad. Photo by Grace Mamon.
