Red Lion historian operates model railroad as a testament to his father

Early in his boyhood, Red Lion’s Tristan Mundis faced a choice: games or rails.

Video games, that is, versus model railroads.

He chose the latter and gained a close partner in that hobby: his father, Marty. Both were influenced by Tristan’s grandfather, Phil Myers, a model railroad enthusiast with an interest in American Flyer trains.

Tristan would make the same choice today, he said just before Thanksgiving as he looked around his West Broadway basement at the humming and blinking model train platform that dominated the room. The smell of burned oil that creates the chuffs from the stacks of the miniature locomotives filled the space.

As the 21-year-old walked around the set with a controller for the two chugging locomotives in each hand, he said he still doesn’t play video games.

Platform takes shape

About this time last year, Tristan and Marty started building the platform that would support the model tracks, buildings and miniature characters that would tell the story of a town in the heyday of steam railroading.

The layout did not reflect any particular town, Tristan noted, although the familiar local names of Bickel’s potato chips, York Peppermint Patties and Plitt’s beverages could be seen throughout.

It’s a project that might take 15 years, but the pair worked with such urgency that the set was completed and operational in eight months.

The platform itself was a challenge. Builders of West Broadway residences a century ago did not care if the floors of their basements were level. In fact, families often moved into homes with unfinished cellars. So the Mundises were left with an uneven floor that would have meant an unpredictable array of sloping tracks above. Grades or elevations, if desired, could be added later in a planned way.

To do that, Marty, a much-sought-after masonry contractor, would bring home a 16-foot level that could make it into the room only through an open window. They then put eyebolts on the bottom of the platform legs that could be adjusted to create a level surface 54 inches above. That detail was needed just to construct the platform.

Each worked on their side of the U-shaped platform connected by a slim bridge carrying the tracks. Working separately would keep them from tripping over each other, to be sure. But a larger idea was at play: Tristan and Marty each had favorite buildings to construct and their own stories to tell.

For example, Tristan, a student of the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad, erected the Ma & Pa’s Dallastown station, a depot taken by fire many years ago.

Marty created a scene of firefighters battling a car fire, modeling his characters after legendary York city firefighters Greg Halpin and John Senft. Marty knew the firefighters and Tristan did not, so he told their story.

Yet they were constantly talking to make sure both sides of the set had the same look and feel.

Marty would ask, “I need to borrow your grass shaker,” a container that vended artificial grass that imitates greenery throughout the set. The entire set blends into its below-ground room that features Marty’s stonework constructed around support poles and built into walls.

Second hobby ahead

The pair worked as hard as two students of model railroading could every evening for eight months, Tristan coming home from work at York Saw and Knife and Marty from his masonry jobs. They might eat an early dinner and then work into the night until they were tired.

Their concentration on the work was so intense that they didn’t run the trains, a common distraction in such projects.

Their urgency stemmed from a fast-approaching season for a second hobby: going to summer car shows with their vintage autos. For Tristan, that meant showing off his 1963 Falcon. Marty acquired a 2002 Mustang in August and the pair made the vintage auto circuit behind the wheels of those two Fords.

One Sunday night in late August, the weather turned unseasonably cold, causing the two to talk about steaming up their winter hobby: that train platform. There was nothing on the platform that was unfinished, which meant that they would add on — infilling buildings, for example. There was one grassy area that Marty eyed for a miniature Springvale station, a Ma & Pa Railroad depot south of Red Lion that closed long ago.

Their winter plans were now set.

Tragedy strikes

But then came a tragic moment.

The next day, Tristan came home from work and was greeted with the most painful news. His father had been killed earlier that day working a job.

He had lost a father and friend, a 49-year-old man who never met a stranger and considered everyone he knew a friend.

His obituary would further say that “his greatest love was for his family and for everyone who crossed his path.”

A standing-room audience filled the sanctuary at Christ Church Yorkana, for this man who “lived his life fully reflecting his love for Jesus.”

Tristan would later say that comfort comes from his belief that his father is in a better place than he had on earth.Friends will reunite

Three months later, Tristan sat in the control area inside the platform with the two locomotives on pause so he could talk. He reflected that this project that he and his father had built would serve as a tie that would bind them, really, for the rest of his life.

He said he could not go to the basement for two weeks after his father’s death and only did so because he had orders for trains or parts that he needed to fulfill.

His friends have helped. Nate Heffner, Tate Lehman and Nathan Filak are fellow rail fans. They’ve come down to the Mundis basement individually.

Tristan just hasn’t had the three friends together to run the trains — such a reunion in that place would be too difficult. But that day will come.

He’s hosted a group of model train experts who were visiting the biannual train show in York.

“They were just impressed at what we had done as a pair in a short amount of time,” he said.

These experts thus answered a question whose answer Tristan already knew: “Is this as cool as I think it is?”

Tristan plans to leave his father’s side of the layout as it is, out of respect for his father and as a testament to those months that they worked side by side. For now, he will leave that area planned for the Springvale station as a grassy lot.

But Tristan knows the story of every detailed piece of the set built by his father. And he’ll tell those stories to visitors, as his father would have done.

Tristan’s reflection on the set and his father’s death came several days after he posted videos of the previous platform that operated for years on the cramped third floor of the Mundis home, a much-simpler predecessor to the basement layout.

“Where it all started …,” he wrote. “I truly had an awesome childhood!”

Upcoming event

York County History Storytellers will host an evening in which local historians present about “Champs and Foes” in the county’s past. It’s set at 7 p.m. Dec. 7 at Wyndridge Farm near Dallastown. $10/ticket. Details:  www.yorkhistorycenter.org/event/history-storytellers.

Jim McClure is a retired editor of the York Daily Record and has authored or co-authored nine books on York County history. Reach him at jimmcclure21@outlook.com.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Red Lion, Pa. father and son worked on this model railroad