All Aboard: Lake City Train Club

from Family Magazine Winter 2022

by North Central Florida Advertiser

The Great Family Pie Review

All Aboard!

By Hayli Zuccola

Informally established in 1985, the Lake City Train Club originated as a way for train enthusiasts to showcase their collections and model layouts with other passionate hobbyists who bonded over recollections of their youth. “A lot of people don’t realize, the trains were a big factor—if you want to call it that—in our life. Real trains were important in our lives when we were small kids,” said Mason Farnell, one of the founding members of the club.

In the 1940s and ’50s, life-size locomotives were used for transporting traveling passengers, hauling fruit and other freight—a phenomenon that captured

“Sears had a little train set that ran around the Christmas tree there, and I kept my nose pressed up against the glass watching that train go ’round and ’round,” Mason said. “It’s amazing to me, it’s just amazing to me that you can turn this machine on and you punch a button and tell it to do whatever and it goes around this track and it follows this track.”

While toy trains may have been the Nintendo of their time, many people ultimately lost interest in their childhood trains, but Mason never did—receiving his rst as a gift when he was four years old and adding to his supply ever since, which today encompasses around 100 to 150 older models dating from 1927 to 1970 and about 50 new, computerized gures.

For years, the Lake City Train Club, which has ranged in size anywhere from six to 12 members, met in a casual manner rotating from house to house and appearing at small events to demonstrate their models. But in 2009, the group was asked to create a Christmas layout for Stephen Foster and accepted the ambitious feat in 2011.

Mason, a retired physical education teacher who taught at Eastside Elementary School for 42 years, had prior experience in designing Christmas train scenes for his students, but lling the park’s 70-foot by 40-foot auditorium would be a project larger than anyone in the club had ever dealt with.

Never having done a design of this magnitude, the society’s rst attempt wasn’t exactly a success. The following year, they changed their initial U-shaped layout for a triangle outline, which allowed guests to walk around the display in its entirety while the member conductors remained in the center to easily monitor the trains on the tracks. The last design they undertook in 2019 was a rectangular arrangement, which turned out to be the largest portable O-Gauge layout in north Florida and Georgia, and marked the last time the club attended the Festival of Lights, that is, until now. For the last two years, members of the Lake City Train Club have been working on a new con guration set to debut at the 2022 holiday celebration.

“This year, everything from the oor up is going to be new. It’s going to be a brand new setup,” Mason said. “I’m gonna guess—I haven’t counted—but there’s, I’d say there are 30 to 35 buildings that are brand new; there’s going to be 200 vehicles like trucks, cars, tractors—that type of thing; and there’s about over 1,000 feet of wiring, there’s 500 feet of track and, you know, hopefully gonna have a lot of stu detailed.”

This developing structure, which was put together in Mason’s barn to accommodate the much-needed work space, has taken 9 months of electrical work alone and was consciously crafted to reduce the setup time from eight days down to four while also taking into consideration the weight of past displays—switching from wood tables to easy-to-dismantle aluminum tables.

“Before, for the 9 years that we were up there, it averaged seven to eight days of putting that thing up; I mean from 8 o’clock to 8 o’clock, so we knew that we had to do something di erent,” he said.

Putting together an awe-inspiring design like this one, as well as the club’s past exhibits, requires far more than simply arranging and connecting the tracks. Each one has combined woodworking elements, artistic skills, an eye for design, electrical know-how and other talents that come together to provide a glimmer of magic to all those who witness them.

“We live through the model trains of yesteryear, you know, thinking about the past and all that kind of stu ,” Mason said. “When we look at the layouts that we’ve done and all that, you have dreams of what yesteryear was, you know, I mean like, you can really get involved and just close your eyes and remember all that.” While park guests Mason’s age get happily lost in memories of what once was, whether that be playing with model trains themselves or recalling family members who worked in the railroad industry, Mason, who spent his career as a teacher, gets the ultimate satisfaction in the pure excitement of the younger audience.

“To me, the smile and the happiness on a kid is the whole thing; I mean, that makes my whole day, and so when we go up there to Stephen Foster and those kids start coming around and you see their eyes dancing and you see them grinning from ear to ear like all the stu that you’ve done is worth it and it’s simply ful lling,” he said.

The amount of time and e ort it’s taken to complete this year’s composition has been extensive, to say the least, and has required expanding beyond club members to include the assistance of other friends and volunteers to turn the vision into a reality.

“These guys spend hours—hours and hours and hours out here,” Mason said. “If it wasn’t for them, this stu would not happen.”

To see the Lake City Train Club’s newest holiday arrangement rsthand, stop by the auditorium at Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park located between the tower and the museum during the annual Festival of Lights, which runs from Friday, December 9th to Friday, December 23rd, every night from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.