WAUSEON — Veteran train conductors from the Swanton Model Railroad Club pulled their resources together Saturday to draw attention to the recently established train exhibit inside of the Museum & Welcome Center of Fulton County, Ohio, in celebration of National Train Day.
“We're celebrating the anniversary of the golden spike being struck in Utah in 1869,” John Swearingen, Jr., director of the museum, said. The golden spike refers to the ceremony that united the Central Pacific Railroad and Union Pacific Railroad into the first transcontinental railroad with a symbolic golden spike, “And Amtrak started this holiday in 2008, to promote Amtrak train travel and history,” he said.
In honor of the creation of the first transcontinental railroad, model train aficionados from the Swanton Model Railroad Club created three additional train tables in the lobby area of the museum, featuring O, HO and N scale-sized trains.
“It’s really for the kids,” Terry Miller, the superintendent of the N scale trains for the club said. By early afternoon, Mr. Swearingen had already called the day a success, as over 60 people had stopped through to see the model train tables and to see the train exhibit, All Aboard: Fulton County’s Railroad History, highlighting the intertwined paths of Fulton County and the different train presences.
Most of the children who stopped by were too young to express much more than, “I like trains,” but parents and grandparents from the area were able to grab a hold of some of the archived information with a bit of nostalgia attached.
“It's just neat to connect it to what we see now,” Heather Dietrich of Wauseon said as a native to the area. And the area thrives and has a specifically tender heart towards the locomotive tradition.
The exhibit, which is marketed towards all ages, with specific interactions for youngsters, highlights, “...the five railroads that were once in Fulton County,” Mr. Swearingen said, and explained that there are only two railroads left in Fulton County.
“We didn't have a river, we don't have huge airports, so train travel was the main traffic flow that brought commerce and shipping [specifically] crops out of Fulton County,” he said. Mr. Swearingen also pointed out that the model trains on display in the lobby of the museum were replicas of trains that would have traveled through Fulton County, including two trolley lines.
“It was possible to be in Wauseon, hop on a trolley, go into Toledo, do your shopping or whatever and come back out the same day,” John Myles, a volunteer at the museum and the president of the board of trustees for the Fulton County Historical Society, said. “You would spend the day doing it,” he caveated, and said the trolley lines persisted with their nicknames the “Teeter” and “Wobble” until the 1930s came with the Great Depression and the rise of the automobile to cease the maintenance and upkeep of the trolley system.
But before those developments Mr. Myles said, “ ... the county seat is in Wauseon, because the railroad came through,” making it a transportation hub for the county. Some of this persists today, as the Norfolk Southern train that spilled in East Palestine went through Wauseon before its unfortunate accident in eastern Ohio.
“We live it every day, still, with the fact that you can be going someplace, and when you get to the railroad crossing, if one of those trains is going by you wait,” he said, mainly pointing to the inconvenience the trains cause automobile drivers these days. But about a century before, the flatlands of the county leant itself to an easily developed number of railroads.
“It's just a big piece of the heritage as far as the development of the county,” Mr. Myles said.
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