30-year-old train project may be history

By Jeremy Herb

For 30 years, a part of James Felt, S.J., has been tucked away in the corner of Nobili Hall's basement.

The 80-year-old Jesuit has been able to further his passion for trains in a secluded basement room, designing, building and running a train layout made from scratch that can run four trains simultaneously and spans 21-by-9 feet, engulfing the once empty room.

But when the Jesuits move to their new residence this summer, Felt's train will be left behind. With students living in Nobili Hall next year, the room will be used to renovate the building's air conditioning, said Joe Sugg, assistant vice president of university operations.

"The whole mechanical system in the building is at the end of it's life," Sugg said. "Even if we weren't (using the room), having a student program is probably not compatible."

Reference librarian Susan Boyd found out about Felt's train from student Dean Paul Dominguez, and submitted an idea to the engineering department to keep the train as a project for engineering students.

"I looked at it, and it looks like it's his life's work. It's kind of a shame," Boyd said. "I just figured it's a last-ditch effort."

Felt, however, said he didn't mind.

"Even if the university didn't want this place, I'm just ready to let it go," Felt said. "I almost never go down there by myself. The most enjoyment I got out of it was planning it and laying the track. I had a sense of creativity."

The train's final run will also coincide with Felt's last year as a professor, as he will be retiring from teaching this June to devote his attention to writing.

Before the Jesuits moved into Nobili in 1975, Felt had a train in his sister's garage, but jumped at the chance to move his railway to Nobili when he came across the empty room, which only contained the building's telephone wires.

"When I discovered this room, and the boss told me I could have the room, that was kind of a dream come true," Felt said.

Felt's train is an invented layout, traveling between the two ends of the room that he calls Westfield and Sierra, referring to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where Felt said the train is "supposedly" set.

"I fictitiously suppose it takes 18 hours to get from one place to the other, and that's pretty long," Felt said. "But the reason I do that is because I'm primarily interested in passenger trains, and I want an excuse to have sleeping cars."

Along with the passenger trains, Felt has amassed 18 locomotives in all, 16 of which are steam engines, and two diesel engines, each with their own realistic sound effects depicting their differences.

Felt devised a schedule for his operation that is split up into two-hour chunks, measured by a clock he has on a pharmacy tower.

He said this schedule is necessary due to the complexity of the layout, which has many practical applications for the trains, including a logging operation, a beer brewery and an electric company.

"It's supposed to imitate a real operation, as much as I'm aware of it," Felt said. "It's capable of having four different trains operating independently at the same time -- if I had enough people who knew what they were doing."

While that would require five people to accomplish, Felt said he's never had even two people to aide him in his operation. Dominguez said that Felt had been interested in training him to run a second train, but it never materialized.

"I tried with many and many a class to get a kind of train club going, so we could have simultaneous operation going, but everybody's busy, and really not that many people are interested in trains," he said.

Now, with the train's end in sight, Felt and a friend will be selling off all the parts they can, and leaving the rest for the university to remove.

"I don't know what's it worth, I don't have any real expensive stuff," Felt said. "There are aspects of it that will never be finished, especially since I know now that I'm going to have to disassemble it."

Contact Jeremy Herb at (408) 554- 4546 or jmherb@scu.edu.