It’s a business, but the McLean Depot Train Shop, housed in the former rail depot in McLean, Illinois, also serves as a passion for model train enthusiasts.
The Pantagraph newspaper in nearby Bloomington recently published a feature about the train shop and the people who keep it going.
Tom Ludlam owns the shop along Route 66 in McLean, a town better known for being home to the landmark Dixie Truckers Home.
One of the frequent customers is Thom Joyce of Bloomington, who became a Lionel enthusiast when he was 4. Another is Mike Matejka of Normal, whose dad was a St. Louis transit worker, maintained streetcars and built a Lionel set when his son was 3.
The depot also hosts rail-model clubs and helps sell the collections of train enthusiasts after they die.
More about the train shop:
Ludlam likes to build models that reflect actual railroads and the way they did business. In the depot, he has an HO scale, or 1:87, model of a line that ran near Gato, Colorado, also known as Pagosa Junction. The town pretty much consisted of a train depot and a couple of stores, most of which Ludlam was able to find model kits to replicate. His setup includes both standard HO scale and narrow gauge HO scale.
HO scale makes up around 80% of sales at the Depot Train Store, Ludlam said. Matejka, too, has an HO build as one of his three setups, along with an O scale and an N scale, which at 1:120 is the smallest common scale.
The layouts can vary. Matejka likes to model most of his layouts after the 1950s, an era when steam and diesel locomotives moved along the rails. His N scale layout uses a hollow-core door as its base, which lets him cut out the top panel to add topography.
N scale is Joyce’s main hobby, as part of the N Scale of Bloomington-Normal club. The club’s logo abbreviates to NSBN, playing off of the BNSF Railway logo.
The former depot that houses the business was built in 1853 and closed in 1970. Ludlam leases the building from the village.
According to its website, the McLean Depot Train Shop is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.
(Image of the McLean Depot Train Shop in McLean, Illinois, by Joseph Gage via Flickr)
As a point of trivia, McClean’s historic wood-frame depot is probably the oldest surviving Chicago & Alton Railway anywhere. Not even Lemont or Lockport are that old.