Young keeps track of railroad history

COCOLALLA — A steam locomotive noses slowly out onto the partially built trestle, chugging forward a foot or so at a time. The incomplete steel structure juts out over a narrow mountain canyon, pointing directly at the tunnel opening being blasted out of the rock on the other side.

Its reach is extended by a temporary wooden crane, pieced together on-site and perched out on the farthest edge of the trestle to allow crews to lower steel girders into place as they labor to span the deep gap. The same technique has been used connect the tunnels that came before on this rugged stretch of rail line and will be repeated for the tunnels yet to come.

With the ropes and pulleys secured, the men climb out onto the wood-framed extension, the Chinese workers sent first to shimmy out along the farthest, most precarious spots where the deadliest construction takes place. Without warning, the crane lurches and then starts to roll slowly forward, threatening to topple into the gorge.

Disaster is averted when a giant pair of hands drops out of the sky, propping up the far end of the crane with one forefinger while the other gently nudges a stack of railroad ties neatly into place on the opposite side to act as a counterbalance. Divine intervention?  Not really. Just the kind of rigorous attention to detail that marks all of the artwork created by railroad modeling enthusiast Art Young.

Young — who moved to North Idaho in 1974 after a career as a California police officer and went on to help found the volunteer fire departments in Sagle and Cocolalla, where he served as fire chief for a number of years — doesn’t build working railroad displays. Instead, he devotes his time to recreating historic railroad bridges and trestles along or connecting to the Spokane International Railroad — a 140-mile rail line built in 1905 by D.C. Corbin to run from Spokane, Wash., to Eastport, Idaho, with a branch line that connected to Coeur d’Alene. The railroad operated independently from 1906 to 1958, moving interchange traffic from the Canadian border to the Pacific Northwest.

As he looked down over a diorama of the run of track that eventually joined the S-I, Young explained why the short line railroad that came to be known as “Corbin’s Road” has monopolized his attention.

“There’s so much of this history that doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “I build this stuff so that people can see how much work and how much creativity went into these projects.”

By way of example, Young taps the wooden crane model in front of him. Crews nicknamed it the Milwaukee Traveler — a nod to the role it played in completing the section of the Milwaukee Road rail line that interchanged with the S-I line and, at the railroad’s hub in Spokane, also connected with the Union Pacific, Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads. At each new crossing, the “traveler” crane was rebuilt — never in the same configuration twice — to accommodate the construction requirements at that particular point on the line. When the task was done, it was broken down, pulled through the tunnel on flat cars and reconstructed at the next gorge.

Young’s trestle diorama includes a cascading creek, a custom-cast bridge, framework of steel girders and layers of soil and rock — all of which has been built to an exacting N-scale model configuration. The railroad ties that appeared from the sky at the last moment are less than the size of a toothpick that has been sliced in half and then quartered. The stack that counterbalances the weight of the model crane is about the size of a matchbox. Even the debris on the steep mountainside has been sized to scale. But it is the trestles along the line that presented the biggest engineering challenge — both for Young and the crews that built the S-I more than 100 years ago.

“It staggers the imagination that they built these bridges in 1905,” he said.

His first scale model was the S-I crossing that once spanned Sand Creek where the junction of U.S. Highway 95 and Highway 200 stands today. Using a 1954 photograph, Young determined how much timber was needed to reconstruct the trestle, compiling a complete materials list to make sure that not a single piece was left out.

“I cut my own wood and I got it done,” he said, noting that he later found a supplier for pre-cut, scaled timbers. “I checked with the state, the highway department, the road and bridge people and nobody had anything on it.

“Besides that one existing photograph, the model is the only lasting legacy to that old trestle,” he added.

With the Sand Creek crossing completed, Young’s research on the S-I led him to someone who not only worked on the line in the early 1900s, but had construction photos and engineer’s drawings of some of its bridges. Those resources in hand, he launched into construction of a scaled version of the 390-foot, curved trestle over Fry Creek, just west of Bonners Ferry. When the diorama was finished, Young donated it to the Boundary County Historical Society Museum in Bonners Ferry, where it remains on display.

Among the engineer’s drawings were the plans for the S-I bridge crossing over the Pend Oreille River near Dover. Four hundred hours and 1,290 scale feet later, the model was done, complete with a steamboat crossing through the open “turntable” section and a train held up on the south end of the bridge as railroad workers attempt to convince a cow to vacate the track.

“A model’s a model, but it’s the diorama that makes it work,” Young said. “What do you do for a bridge?  I made a boat go under it, which justified why I had the bridge open. One thing supports another until you’ve created the history around it.

“What these guys accomplished back then was amazing and it’s not around today,” he continued. “That’s why I work to reconstruct it.”

Much of allure behind these projects comes from the amount of work that went into them, the modeler said. That’s why he elects to build his dioramas to show the structures in stages of partial completion, when the construction materials can be seen and the labor involved can be best imagined.

Lately, his imagination has been carried away by a new project that far outstrips anything he has done to-date in terms of detail and investment of time. Fanning out a pile of black-and-white engineer’s photographs, Young displays images of the Cabinet Gorge Dam in various phases of building. He plans to re-create it to scale, using those photos to capture the dam when it was about two-thirds complete.

“It will actually show the structural skeleton of steel and wood,” Young said. “The two-by-fours I’ll be using are about the size of a whisker, but it’s got to have all of that detail to be believable.

“I’ll probably have at least a thousand hours into this project, not counting research and measurement time,” he added. “But I know how to do it — I can build that dam to scale.”

A railroad history buff from Spokane recently asked Young to create a model for him — a request he turned down because the sheer amount of time involved made it impossible to put a price tag on the job.

“I told him, ‘You can’t afford me,’” the modeler said. “Even at 25 cents an hour, the price would be prohibitive.

“I do this for my own relaxation and because it teaches patience,” he went on. “It’s a hobby that keeps me out of trouble, it’s not too expensive and it’s a way to stay out of my wife’s hair.”

For those interested in more history of the S-I, local author and historian Paul Rechnitzer, in conjunction with co-authors Jack R. McElroy and Jack Woodbury, has written a comprehensive history titled, “Corbin’s Road aka the Spokane International Railway” available through local booksellers.