Naperville 2025

The Naperville freight car meeting, as it originally was, was founded by Martin Lofton of Sunshine Models, partly to provide a venue at which he could sell his kits direct instead of all by mail. But the three-day meeting included a full clinic schedule. He had a talent for finding and inviting a wide range of speakers for the clinics, many of them previously unknown to a national audience. The first meeting was in 1994, and it has continued ever since except during the pandemic. 

Within a few years of its inception, the meeting became one of the emerging Railroad Prototype Modelers (RPM) meetings, an idea warmly endorsed by Martin. After Martin passed away after running the meeting for 16 years, it was taken over by others, who have carried on the tradition very well. Currently Frank Hodina is in charge. The meeting last weekend was the 31st, by my count. Before the pandemic, I only missed a couple of them.

As has been the case for several years now, the meeting took place in the Northern Illinois University’s Naperville Conference Center, a spacious and modern facility. It includes a huge room which was used for vendor tables and model displays. A view of most of that room is below. 

Among the exhibition of very nice models was this mammoth display by Fenton Wells, in part to support the clinic he gave about kitbashing reefers. It’s perhaps appropriately titled “Reefer Madness,” with every model accompanied by a prototype photo. 

The meeting rooms are in a two-story wing of the facility, and it happens to have a two-story-tall entrance hall, in which the Midwest Mod-U-Trak group set up a large HO layout (shown below, viewed from the second floor). Their N-scale compatriots had an even larger layout in another large space. 

Many of the individual modules were very nicely done. Below is a photo, most of which shows the Willow Springs module, with a Santa Fe freight passing under the working signal bridge.  

As always, there was quite a program of clinics, most of it put together by Steve Hile. Below is a single example, Joe Binish about to start his talk about Great Northern’s FT diesel units. I gave two talks myself, on realistic operation for small layouts, and about the new OpSIG Achievement Program (see, for example: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/10/questions-about-opsig-achievement.html ).

Another nice aspect of this meeting is that layout owners in the area organize a few operating sessions. I operated again on Bob Hanmer’s excellent Great Northern and DMIR layout (which I’ve commented on before: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/an-operating-weekend-around-chicago.html ). I’ll say more about Bob’s layout in a future post.

On Saturday night I was invited for the first time to operate on John Goodheart’s Lake Erie, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad. I was lucky enough to draw the Hamilton switching job, a lot of fun and with interesting challenges. Here’s my switcher, in the middle of some complex moves.

This was another fine Naperville RPM meeting. I enjoyed it quite a bit, as I always have. Next fall, if you’ve never attended, you might think about trying it yourself.

 Tony Thompson