Spencer NC - Model Train Show August 24 & 25

Saturday, August 24 ONLY
 

Charles Lamm and Ward Creech

Charles Lamm and Ward Creech will be giving ship building demonstrations through the day.  Both are from the Wilson area and have 70 years of combined model building experience.  Charles has been building model ships for 40 years and Ward originally started out modeling trains as a teenager and began modeling ships about 6 years ago. Both Charles and Ward served in the U.S. Navy and have a fondness for ships. 

The ships that Charles and Ward build are 1/96th scale remote controlled models.  They are typically constructed of fiberglass applied onto a balsa wood frame, however a few they have built are constructed on preformed fiberglass hulls.  Some of the ships are as small as 40 inches and weigh about 25 pounds and some are as long as 94 inches and weigh 126 pounds.  All of their models are remote controlled and have operating features.  Some are lighted, some have operating radar units, some have ballast systems, and some have directional guns.  It depends on the specific ship as to what operational features are added.

 

10:30 p.m

Tony Reevy and His Book, O Winston Link: Life Along the Line

Senior associate director of the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tony Reevy is a graduate of North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Miami University. He is a David P. Morgan Award winner (2006) and a Pushcart Prize nominee.

In his new book, Reevy details the work of O. Winston Link, who photographed the Norfolk and Western, the last major steam railroad in the United States, when it was converting its operations from steam to diesel in the 1950s. Link’s N&W project captured the industry at a moment of transition, before the triumph of the automobile and the airplane that ended an era of passenger rail service. His work also revealed a small-town way of life that was about to experience seismic shifts and, in many cases, vanish completely. Including a collection of more than 180 of Link’s most famous works and rare images that have never before been published,O. Winston Link: Life Along the Line offers a moving account of the people and communities surrounding the last steam railroad. 

 

11:00 a.m.

Children’s Storytelling

 

12:30 p.m.

Matt Baumgarner – Railroad Historian and Author

A railroad historian and author, Matthew Baumgarner is author of “The June Bug Line,” about the Alexander Railroad, the Legacy of the Carolina and North-Western Railway, the largest narrow gauge in either of the Carolinas, the Cape Fear & Yadkin Valley Railway, which covered all of North Carolina and co-authored the “The Lawndale Railway and Industrial Company” and “Watauga & Yadkin River Railroad.” Knowledgeable, a great speaker and historian, Baumgarner will discuss these and other railroads that he has examined.

 

2:00 p.m.

Stephen Little – First Person Presentation

Author Stephen Little will give a first person presentation of his book, “Tunnels, Nitro and Convicts: Building the Railroad.” Still suffering the devastation of the Civil war that ended only ten years earlier, North Carolina shipped prison inmates from Raleigh to build the Mountain Division of the western North Carolina railroad. Some amazing and astonishing events occurred from 1875 through 1879 as this mountain railroad (3 miles straight-line distance, requiring 9+ miles of track) was pushed up the eastern continental divide. Six tunnels were excavated, from 89 to 1,800 feet long, each 15 feet tall. The fascinating and compelling intertwining of long dark caves, blasting and cracking of massive rocks, the first use of nitroglycerin in the southeastern United States, and pushing a big locomotive several miles through the woods up a mountain ... all by hundreds of convicts who worked under severe conditions with the most basic tools ... makes this true account of post-civil war railroad history a story you can’t miss.

 

2:30 p.m.

Jim Wrinn – Slide Presentation

Jim Wrinn has been editor of Trains since Oct. 27, 2004. A native of Franklin, N.C., he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in journalism and political science. He worked at newspapers in Durham, Gastonia, and Fayetteville before joining The Charlotte Observer in 1986. He was a staff writer and editor, and worked for every section of the newspaper he could -- whether it be general news, business, religion, sports, and even the humor column. Jim grew up watching the Southern Railway in his father's hometown, Westminster, S.C., and in Asheville, N.C., and riding the nearby Shay-powered Graham County Railroad at Robbinsville.

Solely or in collaboration, he has written books about the Aberdeen & Rockfish short line, "The Road of Personal Service," 1992; "Spencer Shops, 1896-1996," 1996; "Pictorial History of North American Railroading," also 1996; and the Southern Railway and later Norfolk Southern steam program in "Steam's Camelot," 2001. He is preparing a book on the Graham County now.

Jim is a lifelong steam fan, and he is a qualified locomotive engineer at the N.C. Transportation Museum in Spencer.

 

 

Come spend the weekend at Spencer!