By Thomas Urso, Guest Columnist
It saddens us to announce that we are closing the Valley River Model Railroad Club as certain circumstances have evolved.
We only had three members, one member our treasurer passed away unexpectedly, one member resigned due to physical problems and one is moving out of state leaving only one member left, not enough to be a club.
The club was started in 2007 with 14 members and those members designed and did most of the scenery plus purchased various rolling stock for the “n” gauge train layout depicting Murphy and Andrews. They also purchased and built the buildings that were around the layout.
Along the way, some changes were made and layout was redesigned plus items were also added such as people, cars, etc. In order to raise money, they sold food at Konehete Veterans Park for various occasions, plus held open houses where people would come to see the trains running around the layout and could view the history on the walls of the caboose. Most of the history remains with a few added pictures. There are also some roof tiles from the original roof on the depot which a gentleman from Florida painted for members to sell. Some of the members also brought there own “n” gauge trains to run on the layout. It was fun.
There was a major problem when one of the members resigned from club and removed his “donated” items causing the layout where Murphy stood to be demolished. One of the members, John Meyers, rebuilt Murphy and it was even better that before.
Over the months that followed items were added to Murphy part of layout, including the Cherokee County Courthouse, street lights and people, and even a park behind the courthouse.
We had open houses trying to make awareness of need for members, however no one stepped forward to join. We even purchased Thomas the Tank engine to draw the children in and possibly their fathers but it wasn’t meant to be. Our open houses did generate funds to make repairs and pay for our insurance.
The club has as of this writing turned the keys for the caboose over to the Cherokee County Historical Museum in the hopes that they will make it part of their museum. It would be nice for the Murphy schools would make arrangements with the Cherokee Museum to have field trips to see the inside of the Southern Caboose, Town of Murphy and learn some of the history of when the trains, Southern and L&N, came to Murphy.
It was fun operating the layout, having open houses and generally meeting and talking to people about trains, the times of years gone by.
I personally will miss operating the trains.
The writer is president of the Valley River Model Railroad Club.