Club History

Midwest N Pioneer has had a long history in the suburbs of Chicago, IL. From its inception in 1989 to the start at its new location in 2006, Midwest N Pioneer has strived to produce wonderful layouts for its members to use and for the public to view. Below you will find links that give the history of the club from its beginning in 1989 to the present location and layout.

We hope you enjoy reading about our history as much as we have enjoyed making it!

25th Avenue - Our Current Location

After some time looking around for a new location, the club found a spot in an industrial complex building right on 25th Avenue back in Broadview. Ironically, it's less than a mile from our Roosevelt Road location, so we've come full circle back near the IHB tracks. Unfortunately at this location, we don't have a direct view of the tracks from our layout space. We held our first meeting in our new space on September 8, 2006.

Once a location was determined and accepted, a review of the old layout was done. The club determined that the space we had available would not allow us to resurrect the old layout in any shape or form. A decision was made to restart the layout from scratch, but to plan into the layout methods that can be used to dismantle the pieces more easily than our last design. Several of the more scenic pieces of the old layout were salvaged and stored on-site to be used at a later date for photography or other display options.

Construction has continued since September 2006. All mail line track work and much of the other track work areas has been laid out in its proposed position, except for the steel mill complex. Members of the club are feverishly working on finishing the main line track equipment installation, i.e. tortoise motors, switches, bus wiring, control wiring, etc. Once all this equipment is in, main line track can be used for running trains.

On April 12 and 13, 2008, the club will host its first open house at 25th Avenue. We hope to have both main line tracks running completely from helix to helix on the top and bottom portions of the layout. The work continues feverishly to try to accomplish this task. Trains will be running on the layout, even if they can't go everywhere on the main line. After several years, members will be happy to be able to run trains again!

After the open house, work will continue on the track work to get all areas of the track functional. Once a sufficient amount of the track is operational, scenery work will begin and run at the same time as the track is being finished. By the next open house, we will have the entire main line operational and hope to have much of the auxillary tracks operational as well.

Stay tuned for more history updates!

Harrison St - Our Bank Years

What Happen in Our First Year- 2004

The bank was receptive to the idea of having a layout on the third floor and after some 4 months hiatus we occupied some 2,700 feet in January of 2004 to began the reconstruction, but first the room needed to be cleaned, floors sealed, walls painted & lights hung as there where only 4 bulbs lighting the room and it was dark. As luck would have it another member managed to secure some 40 plus fluorescent light fixtures at no charged. After some three months the room was inhabitable and construction began on reassembling the layout, The T-girders on which the layout sat were saved in 6 - 10 foot lengths and reassembled. However, we had a small problem the area we left was 93 feet long and the new area was 75 feet long, but the width was such that we were able to move the ends of the layout to the side at each end and keep the main body together along the center.

On a Saturday in early April the first sections of the layout were erected by members, a great milestone we hade been looking forward to. Over the following months, the remainder of the layout was erected until we had three sections standing alone. Splice plates were used to reconnect the pieces together, it was surprising to see how some edges had warped/stress relieved after many months of separation. There were many small pieces of track used to join the tracks together and a lot of infill to be done to make halfway decent in not seeing the join. A major scene that needed a lot of TLC was the Intermodal area, which one member spent endless hours filling and matching the paint of the concrete. With our first open house planned for Thanksgiving, it was decided early on that we would not be able to join all three sections together in time. Therefore, a temporary loop was constructed behind the backdrop of the Horseshoe Curve to make it a continuous loop, being such a small area the grade approached 2 .5%. Part of the main body was made operational for push pull operation.

The Start of our Second Year 2005

Once the Christmas open house was over, construction began at the south end joining the Tehachapi Loop to the Keddie Wye end of the layout with reversing loops as before. There will be three levels with the eastbound (water level route) main line, the westbound Tehachapi on the second level and the coalmine lead on the third. An art of construction to figure this out, but will look spectacular when finish. There is an additional scene on the first level below the Westbound mainline, the Santa Cruz branch, which will depict an area south of San Francisco with start of the Salad Bowl express - produce and other features of the area. This took some two months from start to laying track. The construction crew moved to the north end to join the Horseshoe Curve to the Intermodal area. This was an easier task due to the design and within a month track was being laid.

Throughout the first quarter of 2005 there has been much active taking place under the layout reconnecting wires that were cut on the teardown, running buss wires and drops for the new sections. Repairing scenery was necessary and laying out the buildings has been done. Cleaning Track has proved a major task with much of the track had oxidized having laid idle for some 18 months it. We tried the traditional “Brightboy”, denatured alcohol, light sanding with a fine grit which all helped. The track was vacuumed cleaned so we thought. How wrong can one be!!! A member brought along the Atlas* tracking cleaning car and used the vacuuming cycle and all were totally amazed at the performance of this feature. It took at least 5 turns around before there was little to empty. Even though we had vacuumed vigorously,
small particles continued to be picked up by the car, pieces that where hard to identify, sawdust we thought had gone was still being pick up.

With this experience in mind, two cars were purchased for the Maintenance of Way department, with one car using the sanding disc and the second car vacuuming, the track has come back to running condition. A second set is being budgeted for to speed the cleaning of the entire layout. Also included in the track cleaning consist is the Aztec* Eliminator* with magnet for the spikes that have been left. This is usually pushed behind a snowplough to remove any large objects especially in hidden areas.

Roosevelt Rd - Our IHB Railroad Years

A Room With A View

As it turned out, we were fortunate to have a member who did business with a tenant in a building located next to a railroad line. He saw the sign on the roof advertising 33,000 square feet available and couldn't resist asking if we could rent a small piece of that space. When the owner heard what we wanted to do, he told us that he had something better than factory space that he could let us have. The second floor office wing was vacant. It had a tile floor, a ten foot ceiling, fluorescent lighting, and windows looking out onto the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad, not to mention, a very affordable price.

From August 1994 to January 1995, we demolished interior partitions, painted walls, patched tiles, got our electrical system in order, and again contracted with Don Cardiff to design a new track plan which was based on a 92 foot by 18 foot room. Benchwork construction began in February 1995, and was completed by mid-July. Upon installation of the micor roadbed, trackwork began in mid-October 1995. By Christmas 1995, we held our first Open House. We managed to build the benchwork and install track for one of the mainlines and part of the second. In 1996, by the time of our second Christmas Open House, we completed both mainlines and laid the trackwork in our intermodal yard. In 1997, when the N-Scale Collectors Association held their convention in Chicago, we held a special Open House for their members. By that time we had completed block selector wiring and were running as many as nine trains simultaneously for our visitors. By our third Christmas Open House in December 1997, we had some scenery to show in several areas and part of the sixteen tracks in the freight yard under way.

More recently, 95% of the track work is complete and about two-thirds of the layout has scenery. Major features include Horseshoe Curve, Tehachapi Loop, Keddie Wye, a sixteen track classification yard, a six track intermodal yard, an oil refinery, and a steel mill.

It was a sad date in mid-July 2003 when we where asked to vacate the second floor due to an unforeseen problem in remodeling the building and the new windows the landlord wanted to put in. Over a 4-week period members stripped the layout of the scenery and started to cut up the layout into 6-foot sections so that it could be moved out as we intended to find a new location to rebuild it. Our first problem was to find a suitable storage space & the second was moving it. Luckily, one of the members suggested the top (third) floor of the bank where he worked as a possible location, which had never been built out since the building was erected some 26 years ago. He approached his employer and was grant permission to store the pieces there. The move was completed over several evening we members using their cars, vans & even a flat bed trailer. The location is some two miles west of Broadview next to the old IC Des Moines Track (now CN) so we are still able to watch the occasional train go by. With the windows removed at Broadview we were able to get a lot of the larger pieces through them with the aid of s forklift from the landlord. At the new location, most pieces fit in the elevator, but several of the larger pieces we had hope to save did not and a further cut was necessary in the parking lot of the bank parking lot.

Franklin Park - The Early Years

The club was organized in August of 1989, by former members of the Elmhurst Model Railroad Club. The members arranged to rent the basement of a hobby shop in Franklin Park to house the layout, and contracted Don Cardiff, a professional model railroad builder, to design the track plan. We spent the next four years laying track, wiring the electrical panels, and building scenery. In May 1994, the Club decided to look for a new location.