Huntley High CAD Students Team Up to Rebuild Town Square Model Railroad Layout

Five students from William Deuerling's Computer-Aided Design class at Huntley High School partnered with the Kishwaukee Valley & Eakin Creek Model Railroad Club to build a CAD model of Huntley's Town Square as part of a project to rebuild the town-square section of the club's HO layout.

The collaboration came together after the Sun City Board approved a formal partnership with Huntley High School. Sun City resident Dolores Fisher and Nick Wedoff, the school district's Career and Technical Education Department Chair, helped bring the project into Deuerling's classroom, where students Golebiewski, Krystopa, Moore, Bujak, and Rzewucki were selected to take it on.

Getting a real-world town square to fit on an HO layout is not a copy-and-scale operation. Club member and project coordinator David Applegate put it plainly: "Translating the real world into a miniature layout required some creative selective compression; we had to strategically trim or omit parts of certain buildings to fit them perfectly within our available space." That kind of prototype-to-model decision-making is something club modelers wrestle with constantly, and having it baked into a high school curriculum gives these five students a head start that most hobbyists learn the hard way.

The team explored the usual build routes. Kit-bashing and scratch-building were both on the table, and the group attempted 3D printing at the local library, but that path proved too technical to pursue. Where the project goes from CAD files to finished structures, and whether the students or club members will handle physical construction, has not been publicly detailed.

Club president Dale Svoboda has been involved alongside Applegate throughout, and the nine-person team, including Wedoff and Deuerling, was photographed together for a March 12 My Sun Day News feature. For the Kishwaukee Valley & Eakin Creek club, landing a CAD-trained student team to tackle one of the most detail-intensive sections of a layout is the kind of community win that tends to produce scenery worth stopping to look at.