“Big Boy” reignited excitement for trains in Northeast Ohio this summer. But steam engines are a regular, longtime fascination for a “family” of enthusiasts in Kirtland. They share their passion with the public, offering free rides on their mini locomotives through the woods at Penitentiary Glen Reservation.
“There is that certain romance about railroading that it's just different than any other form of transportation,” said Mitchell Lane, president of the Lake Shore Live Steamers.
Lane should know. He fell for the mechanics of it all in his youth and even met his wife through the local club.
On a recent warm Sunday at the park, Lane demonstrated how to fire up his steam engine. Wearing large gloves, he placed coal in the firebox, stoking the flames as sweat formed on his forehead from both the bright sun and the heat generating in the boiler.
“It’s so much fun where you take somebody around and [they’re] like, ‘Is that a real steam engine?’ They want to look at it. They want to come back later and learn more about it,” he said.
The Lake Shore Live Steamers have been passing along knowledge about railroading for more than half a century and have had a track at the Lake County park since 1983.
The club offers free public rides at Penitentiary Glen, generally twice a month during warmer months, as well as some ticketed rides at special park events, such as Halloween programming. The next open rides are August 23, September 6 and 20, 1-3 p.m.
The group typically sees 400-800 riders at these events, and anyone in line by 3 p.m. gets a ride, Lane said.
A family affair
Lane grew up near Penitentiary Glen and would visit often with his older brother, Brent, a train fanatic. For Mitchell Lane, learning how everything worked was even more exciting than the trains. He paid close attention to his slightly older peers working on the locomotives, even tagging along with them to engineering school while he was in high school.
“That's how I became an engineer,” he said.
While his day job has shifted over the years to project management, Lane still gets to tinker with the trains after work and on weekends as leader of the Lake Shore Live Steamers.
The club’s approximately 120 members span multiple generations and spend time together outside of runs on the track, from traveling together across the county to visit other enthusiasts to attending plays and parties locally. Some of the members are literally blood relatives – or joined by marriage, such as Lane and his wife, Michele.
They have been married for 20 years after meeting through the group.
“I'm very fortunate because my family's here, my aunt and my uncle, my cousin,” Michele Lane said. “These people are like family, like uncles and aunts, and so we kind of take care of each other.”
Michele Lane first started attending at the prompting of her cousin, Marcel Uhrich, who built an engine from a kit as a teenager, still operational about four decades later.
“The first time I took one of the train rides … I was hooked, and we had to figure out how to make one,” Uhrich said.
To pay for the equipment he needed, Uhrich said he made change return buttons for Wurlitzer jukeboxes in his garage.
“It just kept going from there. Now we have an aerospace machine shop,” Uhrich said.
Through this pastime, he also meets interesting people when he travels with the trains, which can run on other clubs’ tracks.
“There [are] a lot of people in this hobby that were in the movie business out in California,” Uhrich said. “We got a chance to see Walt Disney's workshop.”
Paying it forward
The Lake County enthusiasts once gathered outside a Mentor flower shop. The owner, Clyde Bleil, had a short track that fascinated current club member and past president Frank Foti.
“I remember when I was a little boy, we were driving out to go get our car fixed, driving by this flower shop and seeing these tracks going around. I'm like 6 years old,” Foti said. “I was levitating.”
Foti’s interest in trains hasn’t waned. He’s excited to see high interest in trains right now with “Big Boy,” the world’s largest operating steam locomotive, traveling across the country for America 250. While that trek is complete, the Lake Shore Live Steamers keep the railroading tradition alive in Northeast Ohio.
“This is our way of paying it forward, you know. And if we don't, it'll go away. And I would hate to see that happen,” Foti said.
To a recent public run, Foti brought his impressive “Berkshire,” which is a scaled-down replica of a real train, Nickel Plate Road No. 757. The train was based out of Bellevue, Ohio, before its last run in 1958. The full-size version is housed at the Mad River & NKP Railroad Museum in Bellevue.
“This engine is actually oil fired, so it's using diesel fuel to create a fire within the firebox. But this is one of the finest examples of a locomotive in our scale anywhere,” said Mitchell Lane.
It was one of several types of trains that carried riders on a trip into the woods at the public run. Like at an amusement park, a club member directed riders to keep their hands and feet on the car at all times before pulling out of the station. When the trains returned, other members were ready to snap photos of the happy passengers.
“My favorite memories are of the smiles that we put on the face of our riders,” Lane said.
