UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Within a lab space off Porter Road, a sprawling cityscape is coming to life, complete with railways, buildings and people. The installation is the hard work of one of Penn State’s oldest organizations: the Model Railway Club.
The Model Railway Club, founded in 1955, is the second oldest continuously operating student group on campus. Pieces on display now have been in the collection for decades, and the entire project is deeply connected to Penn State history. Their current model depicts a fictional rail line, the University Park & Eastern, reflecting the club’s connection to Happy Valley and Penn State.
“We have a whole bunch of different locomotives painted to reflect Penn State culture. All of the locomotives are blue and white. The logo has the Old Main dome on it,” said club president Christopher Coholich. “We even had a Berkey Creamery tank car at one point.”
Over the years, the Model Railway Club has set up its layouts in a number of spaces on campus. Each time they’ve moved — whether due to renovations, a need for more space, or other administrative changes — they’ve started a new layout of the tracks. Currently, the club is on their sixth or seventh layout in their lengthy history, Coholich said.
“We have several layouts of different, varying scales. Our main focus is a modular layout, which is like dominoes — you have track plans on a certain section of the layout, and if they match up, you can arrange them in any order,” Coholich said. “We had a lot of stuff that we're just continually going through, finding new uses for.”
The current layout, set up in the in Research Unit A Modular Lab Facility, is about 30 feet long by four feet wide, Coholich said. But that’s just one of the many projects the club has going; the work ranges from reworking the wiring that keeps the trains running to painting the houses and buildings along the tracks.
“it's not just about the trains. There's woodworking, there's painting, there's scenery and architecture, there's electrical and coding involved,” Coholich said. “There are so many facets of the hobby that we think can appeal to people coming from all walks of life, and we like to share that with everybody.”
The club is made up primarily of undergraduate students, although memberships are available for graduate students, staff and faculty. Once a semester, the Model Railway Club offers an open house for the public to come and view the trains, which are set up either in the HUB-Robeson Center or in the lab location — their usual meeting place, which Coholich said they affectionately call “the space.”
“We had one open house in December just this past year, and that was really popular,” Coholich said. “We were open for two days, and we had over 200 visitors, a bunch of smiling faces. Everybody just loves to look at trains, especially around the holidays.”
The spring 2025 open house will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on April 12-13 in the laboratory space.