Train Buff's Hobby Recreates His UP Roots

METRO

THE ANN ARBOR NEWS • FRIDAY, DECEMBER 25,1987

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Dascola, left, labored for two months constructing the layout. Trains run on a double set of narrow gauge tracks.

Train buffs hobby recreates his UP roots

The three towns represented in the 45-building layout are Iron River, Stambaugh and Casper, all towns in the western part of the Upper Peninsula. The Dascola forebears immigrated from Italy in the early days of the 20th century and settled in that area.

By WILLIAM B. TREMl

NEWS STAFF REPORTER

YPSILANTI - If the foot traffic along the 500 block of West Cross Street is slow-moving these days, there’s a reason.

It’s Dave Dascola’s model trains.

They’re running daily, three of them, in the window of University Barbers on a realistic, 8-foot-long landscape design which duplicates Dascola’s Upper Peninsula heritage.

The Dascolas - Dave’s father, Dominic, and his uncles, Ernie and Patsy - are UPers, as UP natives sometimes call themselves. And all are barbers, as was their father before them.

Between haircuts and in his spare time on weekends, Dave Dascola labored for two months constructing the hills, rocks, valleys, trees, business buildings, tunnels and factories which dot the make-believe towns, surrounded by a double set of narrow gauge tracks. A string of double-lined telephone poles complete with thread for wires encircle the interior edge of the tracks, where loom water towers for thirsty steam locomotives.

A flock of tiny sheep graze in a field and authentic-looking gates guard every road crossing in the layout. Two churches await worshipers in the towns, and trucks and cars appear on roads along the tracks.

The passenger cars have interior lighting and silhouettes of people at the windows, and one green-painted car has the lettering “Go Hurons, Beat San Jose State,” a reference to this year’s appearance by the Eastern Michigan University football team in the California Bowl.

“I put that on before the game was played Dec. 12,” Dascola says. “I had confidence in Eastern.”

The three towns represented in the 45-building layout are Iron River, Stambaugh and Casper, all towns in the western part of the Upper Peninsula. The Dascola forebears immigrated from Italy in the early days of the 20th century and settled in that area. Many of their sons and daughters came south to the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti region to continue their educations and to continue the family barber trade.

A boxcar from Dascola's train is dwarfed in comparison to a Lionel model.

Dave Dascola’s railroad scene is a labor of love.

“I’ve been a train buff all my life,” he says. “Last year I went to Philadelphia for a convention of model train people, and I went there and back by Amtrak. It was a great train trip. But all this work - I figure I put in 800 hours on this layout - is all worth it when I see kids coming along Cross Street with their parents and rushing up to our window to stare at the trains.

“They’re fascinated. They’re the train buffs of the future, the generation who never had the opportunity to see the old locomotives and freights of years ago. I think that’s sad and I’m trying to do something about it."