Eureka model railroad club celebrates 51 years, preserving Humboldt rail history

Inside a building at 10 West 7th Street, the Humboldt Bay and Eureka Model Railroad Club is running a 900-foot slice of Humboldt history in HO scale, and it has done so in the same spot at Seventh and A streets for 51 years.

The club’s long stay in Eureka gives it unusual staying power in a city that sits at the center of the North Coast. Members have treated the layout as more than a pastime, building a detailed miniature world that reflects the region’s rail and timber past. Club president Greg Hodges said the trains are carefully recreated versions of real locomotives, railcars and routes, not toys, and that the work draws on family memories as much as railroad facts.

Hodges has been with the club for 25 years and models the Southern Pacific steam era, which ended in the mid-1950s. He grew up around the Southern Pacific Railroad and remembers his father riding a steam train to work every morning, a memory that still shapes the way he talks about the hobby and the history it preserves.

The layout fills two rooms and includes a dual-track mainline, two switching yards, a passenger station and freight yards. It also carries scenes familiar to anyone who knows Humboldt County’s working past: towns, a lumber mill, logging, waterfronts, mountains, bridges, rivers and even an airport. The club’s railroad is described in train directory listings as nearly 900 feet long, a scale that helps explain why the project has to be collaborative and why it has lasted so long.

That size also gives the club a larger role in the community. Visitors are welcome on Saturday evenings, and spring open house listings put adult admission at a $5 donation, with children 10 and under admitted free. The club’s public schedule turns the model railroad into a local stop for families, rail fans and anyone curious about how the county’s transportation and logging history can be recreated in miniature.

The bigger question is what happens to that kind of local knowledge if the volunteer pipeline dries up. A club like this depends on people who can remember how railroads worked, who know how to build a scene that feels like Humboldt, and who are willing to keep showing up week after week. In a place where so much history has been lost or flattened, the Eureka club’s 51-year run is a reminder that preservation still depends on hands, time and new members willing to learn the route.