Train Club Rolls Into 75th Year With Free Show

Local modelers riding high with cover story in national magazine

By Yousuf Lachhab Ibrahim
The Tube City Almanac
January 27, 2025
Posted in: Announcements

The McKeesport Model Railroad Club’s HO-scale model represents Western Pennsylvania in the 1950s era. (Yousuf Lachhab Ibrahim photo for Tube City Almanac)

The McKeesport Model Railroad Club is celebrating its 75th birthday, and it’s inviting the whole town to the party.

The local hobby group, located at 2209 Walnut St. in Christy Park, is riding high this month, with a cover story in the issue of Model Railroader magazine on sale now.

On Saturday (Feb. 1), the public will be invited to a free open house to admire 2,200 square feet of an idyllic 1950s-era Western Pennsylvania, complete with more than 75 locomotives and 1,200 freight cars.

“There are very few hobbies where you’re going to have seven-, eight-, nine-year-olds working right alongside retired guys [who are] teaching them something,” said Steve Raith, vice president of the MMRC. “There's a lot of people that think the hobby is kind of dying out, but we're definitely not seeing that. We have a lot of growth with younger people involved with the hobby.”

Club President George Sharp said the median age of the group is roughly 40 years old. “We’re also developing clinics for some of our younger ones. Steve did a clinic on building a freight car, and that went very well.”

Club members meet to discuss business on a monthly basis. (Tube City Almanac photo)

The club has also done workshops on learning to solder, paint with an airbrush and all kinds of different techniques involved in model railroading. The hobby requires many different skills, and members have the privilege of choosing their area of interest.

“Everyone has different interests with this hobby,” said Raith. “Some people just like doing scenery. We have members that don't really care about the trains. They come down here for the miniatures.” And there are even some members who show up just to work on the electrical side of things, as there are several miles of wiring underneath the picturesque landscapes that make everything possible.

“Generally speaking,” Sharp said, “our members come in on Friday evenings. They bring their stuff, bring their ‘toys.’ We do some work on the layout, then we do some running [model trains] and just sit down and talk … You know, it’s one big family.”

Crowded miniature interiors add to the fun of the McKeesport club’s model layout. (Yousuf Lachhab Ibrahim photo for Tube City Almanac)

The Mon Valley depicted by the club reflects a time when the sidewalks were crowded with pedestrians, when steel mills still filled the skies with their smoke, and when it could perhaps be believed that a man of steel could leap over a building in a single bound. “It's always sunny here in the Mon Yough Valley,” Raith said.

The club began in 1947, when a group of hobbyists first got together to share their love for the craft of model railroading, but the club only became official in 1950. After that, the club bounced around from place to place before finally arriving at 2209 Walnut St., a former union hall.

Some of the miniature structures, like the West Chestnut Ridge Railroad station, were built all the way back in the ’50s, likely when the real deal was still in use.

For Raith, who works as a graphic designer, the reason why he gravitates to model trains is the escape. He enjoyed trains as a child, fell out of love with them in college, and then returned to them as an adult, officially joining the MMRC in around 2013.

This model of a pipe mill and steel plant, started in the 1980s, has become the centerpiece of the club’s layout. (Yousuf Lachhab Ibrahim photo for Tube City Almanac)

“[Model railroading] lets me express my creativity,” he says. “You come down here and you create your own little world that you can kind of manipulate how you want.”

Many of the structures can be removed to reveal tiny scale people going about their tiny scale lives. The roof of the steel mill was deliberately made out of transparent material so that viewers could see inside as the workers made their plastic steel. For an avid gamer, the hobby might resemble popular video game series “The Sims.”

The club inspires devotion even in members that live across state lines.

Deane Mellander, a retired zoning administrator of 20 years for the city of Rockville, Md., comes up every few months to spend a week working on model railroads. Mellander has been a member of the MMRC for about 10 years, but has been working on model trains for over three decades.

Deane Mellander shows off an HO-scale model of a steam engine. (Yousuf Lachhab Ibrahim photo for Tube City Almanac)

Yousuf Lachhab Ibrahim is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh and a Penn State University graduate. He won a Golden Quill award for his work at the Penn State Greater Allegheny Gazette.

Originally published January 27, 2025.

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