TROY, N.Y.: The story is told of a finicky director filming a costume drama who insisted that his extras wear not just historically accurate uniforms, boots, and headgear but even underwear appropriate to the era. When asked who would know the difference if they wore ordinary BVDs instead, the auteur replied, “I would.”

That spirit lives on among model-train aficionados, like the members of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Model Railroad Society, who since 1947 have been building a series of layouts of striking complexity and attention to detail. They use old photographs, maps, plans, reminiscences, and other documentation to ensure that if the freight cars they’re copying had poling sockets on their end sills, the model cars will have them too. Even when depicting a pile of junk, the members take care that the correct kinds of refuse are represented in proportions appropriate to the period.

The club’s current project, which has been under construction since 1972, takes up most of the basement of a nondescript dormitory (pardon the redundancy) on the RPI campus. It portrays the railroad world of the Hudson Valley and northern New England circa 1950. All the locomotives and rolling stock reproduce actual equipment in existence between 1950 and 1953, but greater liberties have been taken with the buildings. Some of the structures on display were torn down in the early 1930s, while others were not built until the late 1950s. Whatever their era, they are uniformly more inspiring than the parking lots and shopping malls that for the most part have replaced them.

Like a good novel, the layout melds invention with scrupulously researched fact. In the early 1950s numerous railroad lines still crisscrossed the region, including the New York Central, the Boston & Maine, the Delaware & Hudson, and even the Lake Champlain & Moriah. Instead of slavishly depicting the facilities of each one, the Rensselaer group has created its own railroad, the New England, Berkshire & Western, which incorporates elements from each of these lines. The modelers have rearranged some geographical features as well, for reasons of convenience, aesthetics, or space limitations, but everything in the display has a real-life analogue that has been investigated in depth.

For example, at one end of the fictitious Lake Richelieu (which resembles an upsidedown Champlain) is the town of Lake George, a summer resort that is reproduced complete with 1940s-era bathers, a tiny dude ranch, and a miniature miniature-golf course. There’s even a siding that runs into the water for launching boats from flatcars—a setup known as a submarine track. Sandwiched between these two is South Hero Island, complete with a cornfield (made from a piece of fake-grass welcome mat with alternate rows removed), a factory where Vermont’s bounty was canned as “Maine’s Finest Corn,” and a dry-bean elevator operated by the affablesounding Boston firm of Friend Brothers.

The centerpiece of the whole project, of course, is Troy. In its heyday, some four decades before the time of the RPI layout, 130 passenger trains stopped at Troy daily. (That’s 130 more than stop there today.) In addition to these, countless freight trains supplied raw materials to, and carried finished products from, Troy’s many industries: meatpacking (which dates back to the original Uncle Sam, a beloved local merchant of the early nineteenth century named Samuel Wilson); horseshoes and other iron products; coke; and especially shirts and collars. The detachable collar was invented here in 1825, and the resulting haberdashery trade, a local mainstay for well over a century, earned Troy the sobriquet of Collar City. By 1950 social and economic conditions were changing, and these businesses had begun to decline. Still, enough remained of them for RPI’s model to give the flavor of a town that once shod the world’s draft horses and dressed its clothes horses.

Today Troy’s traditional industries are faring about as well as you’d expect the Collar City to do in a T-shirt era. With help from RPI and the area’s other universities, though, Troy is excellently situated to make the shift to high technology. The students, faculty, and alumni who are making that transition happen understand as well as anyone the importance of knowing what came before. That’s why they will continue to be seduced away from their quantummechanics homework by the allure of reconstructing a vanished world of cinders and soot and flatcars.

The Rensselaer Model Railroad Society, located in the basement of Davison Hall, is open to visitors on Fridays from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M. and Saturdays from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. year round. Admission is three dollars. For information call John Nehrich, the director, at 518-276-2971, or write the society c/o RPI Student Union, Troy, NY 12180.

SKAGWAY, ALASKA: For riders on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railway, described elsewhere in this issue (page 22), the majesty of the San Juan Mountains often inspires rapturous exclamations of wonder. It’s safe to say that when the line was being built ninety-six years ago, the workers tended to let loose exclamations of a different sort. That’s even more true for the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad, which covers a 110-mile stretch between Skagway and Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. Along its route the WP&YR goes through scenery unmatched on any railroad in the world, with place-names that merely hint at its beauty (Bridal Veil Falls) and severity (Dead Horse Gulch).

When construction began in May 1898, the main consideration was not aesthetics; it was survival. From Skagway to White Pass the WP&YR climbed 2,885 feet over 20.4 miles, with grades as steep as 3.9 percent. To tunnel through the mountain, workers hanging by ropes chipped holes in the sheer granite cliffs and inserted black-powder charges. Temperatures dropped to sixty degrees below zero, which, as one history of the project judiciously notes, “hampered the work.” Another account remarks that “only 35 deaths occurred” during construction. Laborers were all too eager to abandon the romance of railroad work and pursue the gold strikes that were the reason the WP&YR was being built in the first place. By July 1900, when the line to Whitehorse was completed, some 35,000 men had worked on it, with a maximum of 2,000 at any one time.

The WP&YR was born when two railroad men, each one searching for a route from the Alaska coast to the Yukon gold fields, met in a Skagway saloon in 1898 and decided to join forces. Their creation has lasted much longer than most projects hatched one night in a barroom. It outlived the transitory gold rush and for many years had a steady business with the area’s more stable lead and tin mines. By 1983, with the mines shut down and a highway opened nearby, the WP&YR was forced to stop running, but three years later it reopened as a scenic route. Today it is a popular tourist attraction, and last September it was named an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The honor might seem a bit presumptuous, since the works of man, no matter how impressive, run a poor second to nature in these parts. Yet it’s fitting, because in its very improbability the railroad encapsulates the region’s history since being settled by Europeans. Anyone who rides the WP&YR will be struck by the ingenuity and persistence and toil that were needed to build the tall, spidery wooden trestles, carve track beds from vertical walls of rock, and tunnel through solid granite—and by the desperation, rapacity, and lust for adventure that made it all possible. Trappers, prospectors, and miners come and go, but the mountains remain—then as obstacles, now as scenery. The White Pass & Yukon is a striking example of what mankind can accomplish, but anyone drawing inspiration from it will be reminded at the same time of a much larger lesson.

SUTTER CREEK, CALIF.: The Knight Foundry, subject of our “They’re Still There” column in Summer 1992, has been taken over by a not-for-profit group that hopes to keep it open as a combination working plant and tourist attraction. As America’s only surviving water-powered foundry and machine shop, Knight held out for surprisingly long after the gold mines it was established in 1873 to equip were played out. Subsequent owners kept it operating more for love than for money, and now Historic Knight & Company, Ltd., will try to ensure that Amador County does not add a ghost foundry to its numerous ghost towns.

The foundry continues to serve its existing industrial customers and makes trivets, fireplace accessories, and similar items to sell in its gift shop. Historic Knight also offers tours and educational activities, including the Industrial Living History Workshop, in which enthusiasts pay $350 for three days of learning late-1800s skills in Knight’s blacksmith shop, machine shop, and foundry. As the culmination of their training, workshop participants will perform the actual work of preparing the furnace and pouring. This type of scheme originated with Tom Sawyer, and it is heartwarming to see the spirit of Mark Twain, no stranger to gold-rush country himself, still going strong—though Knight’s trainees will get much more out of the deal than they would from whitewashing a fence.

For information, call or write Ed Arata, Historic Knight & Company, Ltd., P.O. Box 158, Sutter Creek, CA 95685 (Tel: 209-267-1449).