Many kinds of artists ply their trade in St. Tammany Parish, working in a wide array of styles and media. One of the oldest forms of art is that of miniaturization, that is, making miniatures of people, scenes and architectural models, many times for use in dioramas in museums.
Matt Hardey of Covington is one such artist, but he has combined these miniaturization skills with his love of model railroading. As result, for the past 32 years he has been building a model train layout that showcases downtown Covington as it looked in 1927. He went way back to a time when trains, both passenger and freight, were almost a daily routine for the growing city.
The layout occupies a wide shelf all around the room perimeter, about four feet off the floor, with the walls painted blue with white fluffy clouds artistically added for a sunny day background. A large number of realistic looking "trees" from two to 12 inches in height line the wall, giving the whole layout an amazingly realistic setting. The trains are HO scale, so that calls for a 1:87 downscaling of the buildings on both sides of the train track.
That makes constructing them and decorating them a challenge sometimes, even though there are model train layout building kits that can supply tiny sheets of corrugated tin, bricks, and almost microscopic pieces of lumber. Many of the building walls are put together using separate small pieces of lumber glued on a frame.
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His layout includes miniature versions of the Covington Grocery and Grain building, the Delta Pine Products factory (which burned down many years ago), and the St. Tammany Manufacturing and Ice Plant (which housed the city's first electrical power generators). All three of those were in the area that is now the St. Tammany Parish Justice Center and its parking lots. His rendition of the area included a group of pipes that passed overhead across Jefferson Avenue, leading from one section of the Delta Pine Plant to another section where products were processed and packaged. Cars had to drive under the rack of piping when on Jefferson, he said.
On the other end of Gibson he has a representation of Nathan's Sandwich Shop building (originally Charlie's Bar and now Mattina Bella Restaurant). Next to that is the two story building with a second floor front balcony that was occupied by a hotel, a bar, and a restaurant. Across the "street" from that is an old hotel building, the Commercial Hotel, which would later become Hebert's Cleaners.
Downtown Covington in 1927 would not be complete without the Little Napoleon Bar at the corner of Gibson and Columbia, and Hardey has that faithfully reproduced in miniature, based on newspaper photographs and postcards. It was a happening place.
The Little Napoleon Bar and Gibson St. Hotel
The detail in the buildings is extraordinary.
Some of his re-creations may be the wrong color, he admits, but he does whatever research he can to determine the actual color of the historic buildings, often relying on the memories of old-timers who remember what the structure looked like before it was torn down.
That was not a problem when he recreated the Covington train depot, since it is still standing, though long since converted to office space. He did go into quite a bit of detail with the train depot, even making the windows clear so visitors could look into the interior and see the waiting benches and the people sitting on them. He even has some chalkboards hanging on the wall, one with the train schedule and the other with a map of the railroad track system. The print is so small they are unreadable without a magnifying glass, but they are there.
Local architects bought the depot building from the railroad in 1982, he said, and Hardey was able to get a copy of the depot plans from the new owner. He used those plans to construct his replica in miniature. He wound up spending a lot of time on the train depot building, but it was the center focus of his entire train layout, so it was worth it.
Behind the train depot is the famous Covington water tower on Theard Street, with its water storage tank suspended far above the landscape. Each of the four support legs of the water tower has the recognizable criss-cross metal bars (which took a while to glue into place). Today the water tower is a key landmark overlooking the Covington Trailhead. A stylized illustration of an early Covington train locomotive graces the side of the tank today.
Hardey hasn't yet built a model of the water plant's historic red and white building on Theard St. underneath the water tank, but he is gathering research and preparing to put one together. He found the plans for the original water tower building at Covington city hall, so he will be using that for precise measurements.
In an effort to represent many of the landmark business operations in Covington he included many business and industrial locations although they were only adjacent to downtown. That included a Standard Oil storage area with several tanks, since Covington hosted several storage and supply facilities.
Many of the buildings in his layout he didn't have any plans for, so he had to research, design, and lay out the floorplan and frame structure himself.
One wall of his train layout represents the train track and downtown buildings of Bogalusa. That helps portray the scenario of where logs from St. Tammany would be transported by rail to the paper mill there. Another section of the track along the wall represents 1927 New Orleans, where the tracks offered several interchange connections to Covington and all points north.
"Sometimes we have three guys in here all running separate operations of the train system, and one guy handles the carloads coming out of Bogalusa to Covington that are then replenished with carloads going back into Bogalusa," he explained. "A railroad simulator," Hardey says.
It must call for some intense coordination when three separate train engineers are trying to complete their assigned tasks on one big layout. It is a small-scale testament to the ingenuity of those pioneers in big train transport operations that conducted the business of the nation, from one end to the other, back in the days following the industrial revolution.
He noted that the tracks that went to Folsom from Covington were taken up around 1920 so it didn't apply to his 1927 layout. During their life span the Folsom tracks brought many carloads of timber from the piney woods into Folsom's big saw mill there, and the resulting lumber was shipped by boat to points around the world.
When one of his fellow model train enthusiast friends ran out of room in his house for his model train layout, he gave the layout to Hardey. But, when the fellow enthusiast bought a bigger house last year, Hardey decided to give the section back to him. It freed up some space for more Covington buildings and landscapes.
The background scenery is composed of all kinds of trees, but it is not necessary indicative of the actual landscape surrounding downtown Covington.
Hardey mentioned that in Covington around 1927, there were passenger trains coming in twice per day.
Some portions of the layout feature train operations that didn't actually occur in Covington. One of those is a coal dumping station, where coal cars travel out onto an elevated section of track and pour their carloads of coal into waiting dump trucks. He had the kit parts to build one of those, so he built it and put it in a corner far away from the downtown Covington section.
Another structure tucked in a corner is a gantry crane, which features an overhead lifting mechanism that could pick up heavy machinery off of a flatbed train car and then slide over and place it on a truck bed. Someone gave him the gantry crane set up, so he put it together and placed it where it would be noticed, although not part of the downtown Covington scene.
The responsibility of building such a train layout that mimics the operation of a real railroad also brings with it the responsibility of maintaining the dozens of component parts. He says it is a constant job to check the buildings and structures for things that have fallen out of place or need spiffing up. The whole thing being on a platform four feet off the floor gives him the space to crawl under it all and connect wires to all the building lights, exterior and interior. The underneath space is also filled with roll-around cabinets filled with tools, parts, and train cars.
All the building structures were glued together, piece by piece, using several different kinds of glue. He work bench is on one wall, and its offers a wide variety of small screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers and tweezers.
For now, plans call for a few more key buildings, a little more work on the Bogalusa train section, and just keeping an eye out for new projects.
Hardey can explain which railroads originally served the Covington area, their history, their business merges over the years, and the important mode of transportation it provided.
Hardey also explained the workings of modern-day model trains, saying that the locomotives now contained computer chips that receive electronic signals from the tracks. Those signals come from a central computer with a number of controls. Each locomotive has its own electronic identity, and each track has its own electronic identify, so to enjoy moving the trains along the layout all one has to do is push on the buttons. We are all familiar with the way electric trains used to work, but starting in the early 1990's computers hit model train control systems and everything changed. Locomotives now puff smoke and blow their whistles on computer commands.
Modern day full-size train operations use the same sort of computerized systems.
He got his first train when he was seven years old living in Covington. Now somewhat older, his dream is that one day, after he is gone, someone will come into his train layout room and re-locate the downtown Covington section into a local museum somewhere. It is definitely museum-quality work, and a great bird's eye view of how Covington used to look, and also how important the train was to the growing community.
Model train enthusiasts have their own association, of course, and a regional convention was recently held in Baton Rouge. Some model train aficionados have much larger layouts than Hardey, he said. In fact, a few of those train model enthusiasts in the Covington area have bigger train layouts housed in separate big buildings.
It is an artistic expression of history, a form of the ancient art of miniaturized representations of historic people and places, and it certainly offers a multi-faceted trip down memory lane. Except in this case, Memory Lane is about a quarter-inch wide.
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