Twain Harte man recreates rail history

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"I said, ‘Oh, I still have trains. Let’s put them under the Christmas tree,’ ” Zach, 62, a tax preparer, said on Thursday. “It’s been downhill ever since.”

Downhill and uphill, at least for the trains. Zach has been building a miniature replica of the Sierra Railroad with model trains for more than 20 years. In the basement of his Twain Harte home, he has a three-level working representation of the engines and locomotives that hauled timber from the Central Sierra Nevada mountains to the rest of the country.
  

“Most people, when I say I have model trains, they think I have a four-by-eight piece of plywood,” he said.

Zach’s Sierra Railroad consists of more than 1,000 feet of connected, main line track, 280 cars and 38 model engines. He’s built it to be a snapshot of the local railroad system from 1955, including the Sierra Railroad, as well as the ancillary Pickering, Westside Lumber and Hetch Hetchy railroads.

The line starts in Oakdale, where the major rail lines met with the Sierra lines, and runs through Jamestown and Sonora, on up to Tuolumne City.

The setup is not perfectly to scale, and Zach said he had to take some “artistic license” with some of the details.

But the train lines run through the dozen-plus stops that were in place in 1955 — Warnerville, Keystone, Chinese Station, Lime Kiln, Standard and more. The engines and cars are as accurate to the time as possible, with both diesel and steam engines.

Even the sounds in Zach’s basement resemble steam blasts, horns and bells you might hear on a Sierra track in 1955.

Zach designed the layout himself, and he hand-assembled most of the scenery and model buildings himself. Some of them, like the buildings in Sonora, were assembled from kits. But a number of the features on his basement-wide railroad were designed and built from scratch. Multiple trestles, buildings and structures, even a water tank outside of Jamestown, were built using historic photographs.

Zach is even trying to build and paint the scenery as accurately as possible. Scattered around the basement are photographs of natural landmarks along the historic railroad line.

“It’s never done,” he said. “A lot of the fun is in building it, designing it and researching it.”

And then there’s operating the trains. Zach has between 12 and 15 model train enthusiasts over to his house every other week, and together they run the different stops and switches on schedule.

Occasionally, people from out of the area come to visit with the model railroad. He’ll give a tour and run the train for anyone who’s interested, he said.

“The fellowship aspect of it is part of the enjoyment,” Zach said.

For more information of Zach’s Sierra Railway Company, visit sierrarailroad55.com or call 625-5609.

    Contact Chris Caskey at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or 588-4527.