BELLA VISTA — Model trains keep a person young at heart. For 73-year-old Doug Farner of Bella Vista, model railroading has been a part of his life since he was 5. That was the year he and his brother received their first train for Christmas. “I’ve had them ever since, except from college to my first house,” he said.
After moving to Dallas in 1974, he built a room in his garage and started with a 4-foot by 6-foot layout. It has now turned into a 640-square-foot, multitiered layout that involves 410 cars and 47 engines in his Bella Vista home.
Covering most of his basement, Farner’s train layout took nearly a decade to complete after his move to Bella Vista in 2003.
Farner is part of the 12-member Hograils of Northwest Arkansas. The name is short for HO Gauge Railroads.
Eight of the members live in Bella Vista.
“We go out of town to places like Kansas City for three or four days and operate railroads with other people,” he said. “Every April, more than 50 people from all over the country come to northwest Arkansas for the Hograils event.”
Last year, 52 people came and ran the railroads at members’ homes, he added.
Now that he isn’t on the City Council, Farner plans to make more time for outof-town trips, includingvisiting a group of railroaders in Baton Rouge, La.
“Some of the group goes out of town five or six times a year to operate,” he said. “We like sharing our hobby with like-minded people.”
Two of Farner’s friends, Norm Bruce and John McBee, who know each other from their model railroading days in the Dallasarea, also live in Bella Vista.
Bruce, who picked up the hobby when he was 5, modeled his 1951 railroad operation after 100 miles of track in west Texas, where the Santa Fe, Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) and Southern Pacific railroads carried freight. His railroad takes up 1,500 square feet of his basement and requires 14 people to fully operate the wireless system.
Bruce, 72, who had Lionel trains back in the 1940s as a kid, tried to get his soninvolved, who was 5 at the time. He went to Toys “R” Us and saw a wall of train sets.
“That’s what he needs - trains,” Bruce said of his son. He brought it home, and his son was fascinated for about three hours.
“I’ve been fascinated for the past 25 years,” Bruce said.
McBee has a 2,200-square-foot operation in his basement that he started in2003. It also takes 14 people to operate.
His large complex allows “you to do things others can’t do - greater distances between locations,” McBee said. He thought he had 900 cars for his railroad built around Pueblo, Colo., in 1954. Pueblo was a heavily industrial area with the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi River, which is represented in his setup. The city was served by the Rio Grande, Santa Fe, Colorado and Southern and Missouri Pacific railroads.
A trip to Houston to see a model railroad show convinced him model railroading is what he wanted to do.
The members of Hograils don’t just watch the trains go around the tracks. They’re actually working jobs, just like they were actual railroaders.
“We want to have fun,” McBee said. “How each of us defines fun is what we have in our railroads.”
Switching and moving freight is the name of the game for the Hograils.
“Most of us around here like to switch cars,” McBee said of the freight operations.
Farner, who has 135 switches in his operation, develops a manifest from a computer program he helped develop in Dallas.
When a group of seven operators comes to his house, they assemble their train using the manifest and deliver the freight cars to the various towns along the route.
Farner uses a fictitious railroad company - Blue Ridge and Southern Railroad - set in nine towns in western North Carolina, where he grew up, in the 1950s and ’60s. The line uses both diesel and steamengines. He also has a passenger train he runs during the operation to add confusion as trains are moving on the tracks to their various destinations.
McBee and Bruce use a card system in which each operator will meet with the dispatcher and receive a group of cards identifying the cars making up their trains.
Scenery is a big part of Farner’s train system. One unique feature is a valley with three tiers of tracks and wooden bridges handmade of basswood. There is a waterfall flowing down the valley with swimmers at the bottom. At the top of the mountain is a group of cadets from the Citadel, of which Farner is a graduate, lowering the flag in a retreat ceremony.
He casts the rock formations for the mountains using a rubber mold and plaster. An oil-based tint is applied to the rocks to give them a gray and brown color. He also makes his owns trees and shrubbery.
“You have to understand geology and be able to visualize what you’re trying to accomplish,”Farner said about creating the scenery along his railroad’s routes.
Farner has been designated a master model railroader by the National Model Railroad Association. He is No. 278 of 450 people nationwide who carry that designation, and is the only one in northwest Arkansas. A master railroader has to complete seven areas of expertise, such as models, electrical, and layout and design.
“I’m really proud of that and having an overall knowledge of the hobby,” Farner said of his award.
As he grows older, Farner said maintenance of his operation becomes a problem.
“It’s hard to get down and under the tables where a lot of the wiring is,” he said. The control panels and the electronic signals take a lot of wiring.
Farner only has one car that he bought ready made. The rest are from kits he builds, paints and ages. While he doesn’t have any car with graffiti, he said there are decal kits to put graffiti on the cars.
He builds the buildingsfrom kits, and sometimes uses multiple kits to make them unique, he said. Farner has designed some of the buildings to fit specific areas along the tracks. Industrial chain-link fencing was created using painted bride’s veil material for the fence and wire scaled to the thickness of 3 1/2 inches for the pipe supports.
McBee said model railroaders like to operate the lines, but they are in the minority, representing only 10 percent of the railroading hobby. More people enjoy running small layouts or working with modular clubs, where members build a specificsection of track and then meet to put their sections together. They might only set up their operation four to six times a year, he added.
“Guys like to play in a structured settings,” he said. “With model railroading, we get to be kids again.”
Area, Pages 12 on 01/23/2013