Monroe Stewart’s Layout Open House
May 19, 2012
by Bill Day
You
can go to Chicago’s Museum of Science and industry and see a $3 million
layout or you can go to Monroe Stewart’s house in Oxon Hill and see
more detail, more variegated scenes, more freight and passenger
equipment than you can in the Windy City’s museum. Last month, 35
modelers did just that.
You approach Monroe‘s house and see prototype crossbucks and signals
surrounding his driveway and know that, somehow, this is a serious
model railroader. Inside, there is a veritable museum of
railroadiana: lake ore boats, scratchbuilt, diesel engines of various
scales, photos and pictures of boats and trains and, in one corner of
the room, a jumbo screen showing a tape of Alan Keller’s Great Model
Railroads. One of them—number 30—is Monroe’s.
And then you step into his N gauge railroad empire, scale miles of
waterfront, mountains, yards, countryside, cities and villages, all
bound together by two parallel tracks. One sees sheer cliffs, plains,
farmland. One sees illuminated signals arching over tracks, then
lone signals on branches. There are backdrops of varied terrain, each
cued to the scenery around it. It’s difficult to take in everything at
one visit, as testified by those who have been to the layout repeatedly.
In adjoining rooms there are more tracks, wending through walls,
looping back to the main layout. Under these tracks are workbenches,
drafting tables and tool racks. Taken altogether, the layout has
thousands of details. You re in the presence of one accomplished
modeler.
And yet, Monroe started as we all did. When he returned from military
service in Vietnam, he bought a small circle of track and thought
working with it might be a pleasant diversion. Musing over his tiny
railroad, he looked out his back door, saw a garden shed that looked
one of the Vietnamese huts called hooches and named his fledging empire
Hooch Junction. Now a Master Model Railroader, now a modeler with
national recognition, now a modeler with a presence in virtually every
modeler’s magazine, he continues to broaden his horizon. As I was
leaving, Monroe showed me a locomotive he had built, a scratchbuilt, N
Scale, working Heisler. It doesn’t get any better than that.
jAlbum 10
