All Aboard

To say Pete Walton has a model railroad set in his basement would be a gross understatement; you’d be about 130 feet and 13 years short, in fact. And if you count the number of tracks and how many times those tracks run back and forth, you’d be off by a mile. Okay, maybe not that much, but we’ll give it to Pete because when it comes to model railroading, Pete has definitely gone that extra mile. And to Pete Walton, model railroading isn’t just a hobby, it’s a career.

A second one.

It started in 1947, when he and his brother received a model railroad set for Christmas when he was seven years old. While growing up in Rockford, he started building model train sets and layouts. He built smaller ones, then built bigger ones. When he was transferred by his employer to another city, he took apart his train sets, packed away the miniature rolling stock, track, and buildings, moved from St. Louis to Madison, Wisconsin, to Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and eventually to Sun City, rebuilding bigger and better layouts each time.

Along the way, he pursued a 33-year career as a sales executive for American Family Insurance after earning a degree in business management at Northern Illinois University. He chose to work in the insurance business for economic and financial reasons. But his passion was the trains – the Illinois Central, Chicago Burlington & Quincy, Chicago & Northwestern, Milwaukee Road, Georgia Southern, Chesapeake & Ohio,among others.

Today, he has a huge and creatively sophisticated tabletop layout in the basement of his Sun City Neighborhood 10 home. It covers three of the four walls, in one place stretching all the way to the ceiling. If his layout was formed into a straight line, it would be 180 feet long.
Walton is one of the original members of the Kishwaukee Valley &Eakin Creek Model Railroad Club, one of Sun City’s 44 charter clubs.

The Sun City Railroad Charter Club will open its traditional holiday display in the center social lounge of Prairie Lodge through Sunday, December 27. Weekday hours will be 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and weekend hours will be 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The club also will raffle off three Lionel O Gauge trains, with the winner announced on December 23.

Walton has also caught the attention of model railroading organizations and publications throughout the nation. He has hosted three tours of his project, and an illustrated feature article on it has been prepared by a freelance writer and is being considered for inclusion soon in one of the nation’s most prominent model railroading magazines.

“I have been hanging out around real trains, and building model layouts, all of my life since I was about seven years old,” Walton told the Sun Day while conducting a tour of his impressive layout “I especially enjoy the noises of trains, the ‘whooshing’ of steam engines, whistles, the clickety-clack noises of the wheels on the tracks. When I build layouts, I often get a lot of help on the wiring, wood tables, support structures, and buildings, but I do the scenery, which kind of makes me a railroading architect.

“I try to make everything look real, but in miniature,” he said.

His layout has “model mountains” that are 10-12 feet long, 2-3 feet high, and one of which extends from tabletop to the nine-foot ceiling of his basement. Walls above the layout are painted sky blue with clouds, and pictures of buildings and structures are pasted to the walls of his “city” to supplement actual buildings nearby.

“When I was young, I started dreaming about building a layout that included all of the things my imagination could think of,” he recalled. “When I was 12 years old, a friend and I hung out around train yards in Rockford. We got rides on trains and talked to train personnel. It got frustrating when we moved around so much and I had to dismantle layouts and start over again. When I got to Sun City in 2002, I told Del Webb builders that I wanted a house that would fit the layout of those dreams. It’s taken me 13 years to do it, and I’m still working on it.”

In the 1900s, Walton teamed up with Hank Brown, a fellow member of the National Model Railroad Association, which sponsors an annual convention for model railroaders.

“Hank taught me a lot about building layouts and about trains in general,” Walton said. “He quit his business job and started to build model layouts and eventually started his own model train business. We virtually became partners in model railroading.

“My buildings and layout reflect the 1950s, because hat’s what I remember from my boyhood,” he said. With meticulous detail and his fertile imagination, he has created a project that displays miniature mountains that are 10-12 feet long and 2-5-feet high, valleys, rivers, lakes, ponds, tunnels, several shapes and styles of bridges, various kinds of boats (including a paddle wheel),’50s-style cars and trucks parked everywhere, waterfalls, and rock cliffs, and a replica of the late President Ronald Reagan’s house in Dixon, Illinois.

There are farms, villages, large and small train stations, parks, factories, skyscrapers, parking garages, office buildings, subdivisions, all created with extensive detail and reflecting the 1950s era, when the United States was enjoying a huge economic boom after World War II. His layout includes 600 feet of HO gauge track, and about 130 buildings.

“Rich Porto, one of the railroad club members, is a talented craftsman who constructs buildings, and many of them that I have now are his work,” said Walton.

At one spot is a campsite, where a couple has a put tent attached to their sedan, one of the original versions of a camper. The figures of a husband and wife are about an inch tall.

“He’s drinking and she’s giving him a piece of her mind,” Walton joked. Further on, there’s a two-foot high waterfall on a mountainside.

He has several passenger and freight trains running all over the layout and hundreds of feet of wire activated by a remote similar to those used for TVs and electric lights.

Brown named Walton’s project the Great Midwestern Railroad.

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