Charlie and Mark

October is not the premier month for model railroaders. The hobby lost anther great one this October when Charlie Hedrich went to the great model railroad in the beyond.

I met Charlie at the National Model Railroad Convention conducted in Washington, DC in 1982. Charlie was a retired Warrant Officer from the Navy and being a sailor myself, we naturally had a lot in common. During the show we got to know each other pretty well and when I found out that Charlie was originally from North Tonawanda, which was close to where I was stationed at the time, we decided we should get together sometime. One thing lead to another and soon enough Charlie and I did get together. Over the years we developed a long lasting friendship that has endured throughout Charlie’s life.

Charlie was especially talented with track work and electronics. Anything he did was done to perfection. He built two N-trak end loops where he would run a Southern railroad passenger train at full speed around the linear layout: BACKWARDS! This amazing feat was possible because of Charlie’s meticulous attention to detail in assembling the track work. It was remarkable to watch that long passenger train traverse the entire layout, up the curved grades to the mountain line and returning without so much as a hint of derailing over that perfect track work.

Over the years Charlie came to visit me many times. In return, I also visited him in his adopted home of Virginia Beach. While there, Charlie and I built many electrical items to support the local N-trak club including a power supply and a few N-trak throttles. Charlie also built a tee yard that brought all the N-trak lines into a yard inside the main layout. This made making train consists easy for the operators since they were inside the layout and not as distracted by the public as when outside the layout. Charlie also made sure he had a vehicle that would support transporting any modules he had and others that may have needed help.

Charlie was life member of the NMRA, although he often disagreed with many of their policies. Even still, Charlie was a staunch supporter of all model railroading endeavors regardless of scale. Whenever he would visit FUNTRAK and me, he would bring along something to support the show. One year he got together with our mutual friend, Mark Bean, and ran a 150 car train on the N-trak layout just to show that this long train could negotiate twelve inch radius corners with a hitch. As expected, this went without any problems.

One of Charlie’s philosophies was that in his life he had met, if he was lucky, about 100,000 people. Today the population of the United States is above 316 million. So Charlie would say that there were over 315 million people who had not had the opportunity yet to learn to dislike him. Therefore, his time to depart had not yet arrived. So in closing, Charlie I’m afraid you have disappointed some 315 million people by not allowing them the honor and privilege of meeting you. But for those of us fortunate enough to have known you, Thank You Very Much! May you rest in peace and enjoy the great layout in the sky.

Brian