Photo of the Month - March 2012 - Roy "Penn" Minerd's Model Train Layout

The late Roy "Penn" Minerd, a retired music educator of Long Island, N.Y., relished his family's early ties to Southwestern Pennsylvania and memories of the region's industrial might. He was a longtime model railroad buff and fashioned his own layout in the basement of his home, featuring coke ovens, rail yards and neighborhoods modeled on his observations over the years in his parents' hometowns of Uniontown and Connellsville, Fayette County, and later in Erie, Erie County, PA. The layout today is in the possession of the Oyster Bay Railroad Museum on Long Island, with the hope of a future display once funding is secured.

At right, a close-up view of a row of coke ovens, company houses and a coal tipple that he created by hand. The railroad yard is based on the yard in Erie, where Penn's father was a medical resident at Hamot Hospital in the 1920s. While in Erie, the Minerds lived in a rented house on a hill, and circa 1924, as a nine-year-old boy, Penn would walk to a cliff above the yard to watch the fascinating activity of the trains. As an adult, he created the layout from memory. Recalls a daughter: "We used to call the town at the opposite end of the layout from the ore dock, Smokey Town, because Dad smoked a pipe while he worked and there was always a little cloud of smoke above the village." Almost everything in the layout was built from scratch, using objects from around the house -- such as a lighthouse made from a white plastic dental floss container. Another of his daughters painted the blue sky dotted with clouds. He used a jeweler's visor over his own reading glasses to work with the finest of detail.

Penn and his wife Jane (Sage) Minerd were special guests at our 1992 national family reunion, while his brother Robert Edwin Minerd and wife Gloria (Brush) Minerd attended our 1998 gathering to speak about his World War II naval combat experiences. Penn and Bob's father, Dr. Roy Sheppard Minerd, and grandfather Rev. Isaac Herschel Minerd, were founders of the original Minerd-Miner Reunion of southwestern Pennsylvania in 1913.

VisitPittsburgh.com is the promotional sponsor of this page.