Rails rear themselves in multiple ways for Christmas

“Planes, Trains & Automobiles” stays synonymous with Thanksgiving, especially from the traveling travails covered by the movie in 1987 with Steve Martin and the late John Candy.

However, choo-choos keep chugging along as a briightening fringe benefit of the yuletide season, and they’re whistling loud and clear across the north and south parts of the Grand Strand.

At Brookgreen Gardens, where special exhibits to close the year not only go all out, but all aboard, check out the Rainey Sculpture Pavilion area for “Holiday Memories: Trains, Trees, and Treasures,” through Jan. 3. It’s free with regular admission, and during “Nights of a Thousand Candles,” for which the final weekend is 3-10 p.m. Thursday-Saturday.

Robin Salmon, Brookgreen’s vice president of art and historical collections and curator of sculpture, summarized how besides period trees and a Tiffany-inspired store window with costume jewelry borrowed from a private collection, the exhibit theme builds upon its previous displays of electric model trains, period Christmas trees, and other throwbacks to celebrations in the early to mid-20th century.

Besides layouts of Lionel, American Flyer, and Bachmann model trains, the room also boasts a collection of paintings by Angela Trotta Thomas, a Charleston resident known for her classic automobile art and known as “The Train Lady.” The Charleston-based artist’s book released this autumn is titled “Painting an American Icon — The Lionel Train Art of Angela Trotta Thomas.”

Youngsters might like the “Thomas the Train and Friends” display in front, with its whole “Island of Sodor.” People of all ages need to step outside and behind the gallery, near the Pavilion Restaurant, too, for the “Front Street Georgetown” train display, where the expansion includes the historic downtown town clock, Harborwalk, and other trains.

Helen Benso, vice president for marketing at Brookgreen, also brought up the historical significance with Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington, the gardens’ founders, whose family fortunes were fueled by success in the railroads and shipbuilding industries.

Find Brookgreen with its long, scenic gateway entrance, on U.S. 17, between Murrells Inlet and Litchfield Beach, across from Huntington Beach State Park.

Model railroad club abuzz in mall

The Grand Strand Model Railroad Club, based at Myrtle Beach Mall, at U.S. 17 and S.C. 22, near Briarcliffe Acres – and open year round, 4-7 p.m. Mondays, noon-4 p.m. Wednesdays, and 10 a.m.-5 p.m Saturdays – continues expanding its reach across the area. Besides setting up a 4-by-8-foot Lionel train display for this weekend at the Socastee Heritage Foundation’s “A Christmas Fair at the Sarvis House” preservation benefit, at 4210 Peachtree Road, Socastee, at Dick Pond Road, the club drew more than 600 patrons at its annual train show and sale this autumn.

Edward Sharrett, an Air Force retiree and president of the 75-member club for 20 years, said its mall site, open for 4 1/2 years, and three doors from Bass Pro Shops, has exceeded than 142,000 visitors, including 2,100 tallied just from Thanksgiving weekend. The 100,000 visitor milestone, with a “little boy and his dad,” generated a surprise Lionel train set prize for them to bring home, Sharrett said.

Guests to the all-volunteer club site, with four popular model train gauge scales – G, HO, N, and O (Lionel) and always with free admission – have their choice of interactive elements among several trains motoring around the space in specially crafted landscapes, with buttons to press, such as to activate a helicopter or unload some lumber.

Sharrett said this industry of a hobby continues modernizing electronically, with new models boasting “digital command control,” including such easy ways to sound a whistle, hear an engine, and see the speed of the train on the toy tracks.

“The sound system has reinvented the hobby,” said Sharrett, who got hooked on the pastime in childhood through his father’s and grandparental interests and attends model train shows across the Eastern Seaboard.

He also laughed aloud recounting one recent visitor who stopped by the club site in amazement, asking “What is this?” – “I said, ‘It’s day care for senior citizens.’ ”

Sharrett said the club also will join with four other organizations in the eastern Carolinas to help stage a grand show in April with the Wilmington Railroad Museum downtown in the Port City, and 2-for-1 admission will cover the show in a convention center, and the neighboring museum – at 500 Nutt St., which is open this winter, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, for entry of $9 ages 13 and older, $8 seniors and active military and veterans, and $5 ages 2-12 (910-763-2634 or ).

Be sure to look up inside the Grand Strand club site, especially for the train trestle crossing, a recently acquired donation, over the entrance. The club also will be open four straight days through Dec. 24 in Christmas week.

On a larger, life scale, Sharrett also said the club is working with the R.J. Corman company of Kentucky, which has purchased and continues rebuidling area short-line railroads for use again, with spans across Horry County as well. After shipments of freight resume rolling across tracks in such places as Conway, an awareness campaign will remind motorists to “stop, look and listen” for trains, which “cannot stop on a dime,” Sharrett said, noting that drivers also never should try speeding across gates in the down position at rail crossings toward which a locomotive is thundering ahead.

Chronicling his career on rails for a book

A Burgess community resident has written an autobiography, released this fall by Dorrance Publishing Co., about his 35 years working for railroads (dorrancebookstore.com/auofjaoywase.html).

The 110-page paperback of the “Autobiography of James E. Oyer” embodies a chronicle of the author surviving three train wrecks – in 1962, ’69 and ’94 – and three other “scares” while on duty, as well as shares some rail industry history. Oyer said last weekend that the book is available locally at Barnes & Noble Booksellers at The Market Common and all three Books-A-Million stores across the Grand Strand. He also said he hopes to schedule book signings in the near future.

Oyer said the project to write the book began four years ago at age 70, and it takes readers back to employment across the rails of New York state and Pennsylvania, starting with his hiring in 1960 as a brakeman in Hornell, N.Y., and including his tenure with the former Conrail entity.

One of the scares that turned into miracles includes an adventure in a caboose in the 1970s, when a train headed from Binghamton, N.Y., but the engineer was unable to the start the customary slowdown about eight miles from the start of a descent leading into Scranton, Pa., going 55 mph until late stopping about just two miles before the start of the hill. Derailment was averted, Oyer said, so gratefully, because in continuing at that speed on a second curve approaching Scranton, he and the crew “would have been killed.”

Oyer said he spent about nine months documenting his thoughts for the book, then working through details for its eventual publishing in September, not to derive profit, but to help his own charitable efforts and to “bring back the old part of” railroad history, including his roots in the Northeast.

He called the personal memoirs “a tragedy and trauma” in themselves, because he never had heard of any railroad hand living through three derailments.

“Nobody has ever gone through anything like that,” Oyer said during a Saturday afternoon of watching college football conference championships on television.

With his bride of 53 years, Charlotte Oyer, whom he called “the biggest miracle of my life,” they have sons who in turn have made them grandparents four times over.

In scanning the corporate rail field, James Oyer also noted how the industry has downsized through the decades from hundreds of major cross-country carriers to less than a dozen in the 1990s. Yet, railroads remain “still the backbone of this country” in transportation of goods that sustain the economy, he said.

Oyer voiced his appreciation for preservation efforts to restore and rebuild railroad depots and stations for such uses as museums and restaurants. (The Myrtle Beach Train Depot remains a hot spot for event rentals.) He said he’s among many personnel from former railroad positions “all over the country” who have donated old uniforms, lanterns, and other mementos to museums to keep railroad heritage rolling down the track.

Retired away from the harsh, cold winters up north, Oyer said he has “a whole bunch” of model trains, in an attic, and he has not ridden a train since his time of work. His latest hobby has taken a different road: restoring a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado, red with an “all white” top and interior.

This story was originally published December 12, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Rails rear themselves in multiple ways for Christmas."