Stations Of Life

A Pottersville couple's track to model railroading success

Story by Benjamin Pomerance

Clarke Dunham casts an imposing shadow over Montpelier, Vt. The smallest capital city in America sprawls out below him — the Vermont statehouse, City Hall, the shops along Main Street, the bridges that cross the Winooski River. Dunham stares down on it all, Gulliver among the Lilliputians, breaking off our interview in mid-sentence to perform a spot-check on his latest project. There will come a time when this creator will call it good. Now is not that time. He studies the miniature metropolis with a seasoned eye, saying more with his silence than many orators say with words. Finally, he comes out of his mini-trance, looks up, smiles wryly. “It’s a start,” he laughs lightly. “We’re under way. But from what we have now, we’ve got a long way left to go.”    

A long way? Distances are relative when you have part of the State of Washington on your adjoining table, and pieces of Colorado and Switzerland in your next room. Time and place seems somewhat skewed when pieces of your work are scattered throughout the country, from Des Moines, Iowa, to New York City and everywhere in between, all originating from a converted barn at a converted lodge in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains. Dunham Studios is the official name, heart of a model railroading empire based in Pottersville, N.Y., the fruition of a dream that was not so much impossible as it was unexpected when it was born. Clarke and his wife Barbara spend hours upon hours at this place — the barn, after all, is mere steps away from their year-around home on the property — with their four-person staff, their elaborate layouts, and, of course, their trains. Lots of trains. Trains for layouts that have gone all over the word, built in Pottersville and shipped by truck and assembled in corporate offices, major museums, and the homes of multi-millionaires. Trains that run on layouts that have catapulted Dunham Studios to the pinnacle of today’s model railroading world. Most people would assume such an enterprise was a life’s work. They’d be wrong. For the Dunhams, it’s just another station.

"Clarke and I have been together since we were 15 and 16, and even then, he played with trains"

Where does it all begin? Try Dorothy Parker’s living room. Growing up, Clarke Dunham’s parents introduced their son to a circle most people know only through the history books. Clarke’s mother was a painter. His father was a philosopher, the writer of a work — a book titled Man Against Myth — that made it all the way to the New York Times Best-Seller List. Both parents were friends with people who gave Clarke a steady diet of intellectual haute cuisine…including Parker, with whom Clarke recalls playing “Twenty Questions” when he was a young boy. Ultimately, though, Clarke took more to his mother’s career than his father’s. Painting itself was out, he decided, but some form of art had to be in. Acting was his initial passion, leading him to a number of parts in college, regional, and summer stock productions, but…if not performing on the stage, what about designing sets for the stage? “I don’t really have an exact time in my life where I knew what I wanted to do,” Clarke remembers. “But I did know relatively early on that it would be something in theatre.”

Before the stage, though, comes setting the stage. Enter Barbara, Clarke’s future wife. They meet as young teenagers — and from the start, Barbara remembers, there was one constant about Clarke, foreshadowing for their unpredicted life together. “Clarke and I have been together since we were 15 and 16,” Barbara laughs, “and even then, he played with trains. He and his cousin would always be playing with trains.” For her part, Barbara still finds model locomotives to be somewhat loco. “I hate trains,” she states emphatically. “I like scenery. Trains have personalities. When you turn (model trains) on, they do as they please.”      

As Clarke remembers it, his interest in model railroading originated when he was around the age of 14. Yet the co-owner of Dunham Studios says he never intended to parlay his hobby into a career. “I loved playing around with it,” Dunham says, “but it wasn’t something where I said ‘This is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’ It wasn’t like I was particularly good at it. I never built any sort of model railroad that actually ran.” Instead, Clarke’s ambitions were Broadway-bound. He and Barbara both attended the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, worked together as scenic artists right after their graduation, then began commuting to New York as Clarke began expanding his scenery interests and Barbara embarked on a sculpting and woodcutting career. Ultimately, Clarke found a niche with high-powered producer Harold “Hal” Prince, becoming one of the favored designers for a man who remains a legend on the “Great White Way”. To this day, the partnership between these two men remains strong.

Next station: Broadway. Clarke’s work calendar in New York City quickly was filled with projects, many of which were hailed as successes. He earned a Tony Award nomination in 1984 for his set design on the play The End of the World; the following year, he received a second nomination for his work on a new musical, Grind. Yet to hear Clarke talk of Broadway life, it almost seems as if impressing the notoriously impatient Prince was even harder than impressing the Tony nominating committee. When asked what it was like working for Prince, Clarke pauses, then grins. “Make sure you aren’t doing anything for a year afterward,” he says. “When you’re working (for Prince), it will take that long to recover. It’s not for the faint of heart. You can expect to go through two or three versions, sometimes leaving the best one behind, before he’s satisfied. Hal knows what he wants when he sees what he wants, and not a moment before.”    

"What we saw was Broadway dying all around us." 

What Prince wanted was Clarke Dunham’s work. After doing a number of designs for Prince, Clarke passed on working on the impresario’s next project…a musical based on a French novel titled The Phantom Of The Opera. Then Clarke returned with Prince for a number of other successful productions, including two of Clarke’s personal favorites: New York City Opera Company stagings of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. The latter, Clarke recalls, got off to a start that was anything but pleasant. Convinced he was going to be fired due to a nasty disagreement he had with Prince over the sets on another show, Clarke left New York City, only to get an urgent phone call from one of Prince’s associates. “He said, ‘Hal Prince needs to see you in New York immediately,’” Clarke remembers. “And I said, ‘Look — I’m not going to go to New York to be fired. He can fire me over the phone.’ And he said. ‘You’re not going to be fired. It’s about Candide.’” He pauses. “And I said, ‘I’ll be right there.’ I rushed to New York and walked into Beverley Sills’s office at the New York City Opera, and without looking up from her desk, she said two words to me: ‘Design fast.’” He pauses again, then laughs heartedly. “And that was the start to one of the greatest productions of my career.”

At the same time, though, Clarke says he and Barbara began wondering how much longer his scenic design career would last. “What we saw,” he says, “was Broadway dying all around us.” So the Dunhams prepared to move on to another station in their lives. As it turned out, the destination fell right in their laps…in an entirely unexpected manner. And as it turned out, it would put them on the track they have been traveling ever since.

An odd offer began their journey. Right after his second Tony nomination in 1985, Clarke was offered a large designing contract for scenery that would never be used in any show. Citibank Corporation, not any theatrical producer, was his client. And the set would be used not by actors, but by miniature trains. Somewhere inside him, the offer stirred an old interest. Through all these years of Broadway successes, Clarke Dunham had hardly lost his passion for model railroading. That interest, coupled with his fears of Broadway’s demise, led Clarke to sign his first railroading contract.

And then he waited. “In the commercial world,” Clarke explains, “the client doesn’t always pay when you expect them to.” It took nearly two years before a blue envelope from Citibank arrived in the mail. The two-year-old contract with Citibank was the last thing on Clarke’s mind as he fished the envelope from his mailbox. “I was going to tear it up,” he recalls, “but I’m glad I didn’t.” Inside was a Xerox copy of his contract…and a check for $68,000. Citibank was ready for their trains.

"I had been a model railroader for over 30 years, but when I began working on Citibank, I quickly found out just how much I didn’t know"

The timing stunk. Clarke was in the midst of designing sets for two Broadway shows when Citibank’s check arrived at his door. Work on the train layout would have to be postponed. Added to the pressure was the fact that Clarke still had never designed a working model railway. “I had been a model railroader for over 30 years,” Dunham laughs, “but when I began working on Citibank, I quickly found out just how much I didn’t know. So I had to take sort of an on-the-job immersion course in professional model railroading, being both the professor and the student, to try and get this job done.” He pauses. “That was the beginning of where we are today.”

Over six days in November, Clarke and his crew hurriedly assembled the massive multi-level layout in the atrium of Citibank’s Manhattan skyscraper. The assembly wasn’t tested once before the gala unveiling. “On the last day we had to work, we set the entire thing up, and there was a three-quarter-inch gap in the tracks,” Dunham remembers. “We were still stapling down new track an hour before the exhibit opened.” A huge crowd had gathered for the event. Time Magazine had sent photographers, and the entire Broadway cast of Starlight Express was scheduled as Clarke’s opening act. The stage was set for the hastily built layout to fail spectacularly.

Yet it didn’t. “We were a huge success — somehow,” Dunham recalls. “I had been up for 48 hours without any sleep at that point. By then, I didn’t think I ever wanted to see another model railroad layout. But it was like any other Broadway opening. You couldn’t lose for winning. And it’s kind of stayed that way for us for over 20 years.”

After more than 141,000 people visited “Citibank Station” in that inaugural season, Clarke was invited back to Citibank for another year. And another. And another. In Year Two of the project, seeing the writing on the wall, Clarke and Barbara purchased an old Adirondack lodge in Pottersville, turning the barn into the model railroading workshop that is now Dunham Studios. Yet the Dunhams expected that only the Citibank layouts would emerge from their mountainside hideaway. That idea ended in December of 1990, when Citibank’s financial situation made the train layout a casualty of cost-cutting moves. “So we placed our first ad in Model Railroader magazine,” Clarke says, “and hoped for the best.” No commercial clients responded. Then, one day, a call came in from the P.T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Ct. Could the Dunhams fashion a layout for an exhibit the museum was opening about model trains? “Of course, we said yes,” Clarke says, “and the custom layout business was off and running.”

It seems they haven’t looked back since. Eventually, Citibank renewed the contract for the popular station, which returned to the skyscraper’s lobby every winter until 2009, when the layout was again victimized by the company’s economic hardships. Even without this contract, though, Dunham Studios is hardly suffering. Dunham layouts reside across the country — America’s Railroads on Parade in Williamsburg, Va; the Western Heritage Museum in Omaha; Neb.; the Cincinnati History Museum; Navy Pier in Chicago. Then there are the other clients, the ones the Dunhams can’t name to protect their privacy, the millionaires and billionaires that find untold pleasure in watching toy trains travel through scale-model worlds. Some are real, researched and built to historically accurate scale by the Dunhams and their crew: others are fantasies, remarkably imaginative worlds that exist only in the builders’ minds. All are expensive. The simplest layouts from Dunham Studios run at about $175 per square foot, the more complex routinely cost around $300 per square foot. Total price tags of half a million dollars are somewhat routine. And even in the midst of a global recession, Clarke says, people still pay top dollar for their custom layouts. “I can’t explain it,” he says, “but if it means more work for us, I’m happy.”

"Clarke likes to have more than one job in progress at the same time"

Delia Bowstead says there’s never any shortage of work around Dunham Studios. After meeting Clarke and Barbara through artistic circles in 1990, Bowstead was ultimately recruited to bring her background in theatrical design to Pottersville. She’s remained there ever since, amassing a layout portfolio that includes some of Dunham Studios’ largest undertakings. For the Cincinnati History Museum layout alone, Bowstead’s tasks included replicating the Union Terminal building in all of its Art Deco glory and assembling a model of Crosley Field as it appeared in the year of baseball’s first night game, with fiber-optic lighting and seating for 30,000 spectators…in addition to working on a couple other layouts at the same time. “Clarke likes to have more than one job in progress at the same time,” Bowstead says. “There’s always something in the works in the design phase and one or two in stages on the floor.”

On this particular day, at least three layouts are in progress throughout the Studios’ two large workrooms. All three are personal orders; at least one is for a train-obsessed CEO. One is specially designed to swing around various articles of furniture throughout the client’s rooms. “Every layout is different,” says Barbara, who artistic talents lend themselves well to scenic detail work on the projects. “That’s what makes it fun. You have a client who has an idea, and you have to do what you have to do to turn the client’s idea into reality. That’s not always easy. Some of the things they come up with are pretty strange. But we do it, and we do it in a very creative, innovative way.”

As a theatrical designer herself, Bowstead says she believes the Dunham difference comes from Clarke’s Broadway background. “The fact that Clarke is primarily a set designer has meant that there is, beyond just the representation of a place or time, an approach to the presentation that is evocative,” she explains. “Just as a good set designer is sensitive to the director’s concept or ‘through-line’, Clarke is sensitive to his client’s interests.”

What he’s not sensitive to, or at least not willing to conform to, is traditional model railroading ideas that simply do not work. “The reality of model railroading is really a game of Telephone,” he says, shaking his head. “Joe talks to Sam, and a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing decide what the truth is. I can’t subscribe to that.” So Dunham’s layouts use interlocking wooden theatrical platforms instead of “L-girder” bench work, and feature scenery carved out of Styrofoam instead of the much more conventional plaster. “Was (using Styrofoam) unconventional? Yes,” Clarke says. “But sometimes, you just have to do what works. This worked, and I think the hobby of model railroading is better for it.”

And in the end, Barbara and Clarke say they're better off because of model railroading. “Our kids always laugh at us,” Barbara says. “They say they do grown-up things, and we’re still up here playing with toys.” Yet the couple gives no indication of “growing up” anytime soon. After a life that has brought them through many stations, they’ve arrived at a place where they seem satisfied to stay...and all signs point to them staying there for many years to come. “What we do here is not easy,” Clarke says, “but it’s not brain surgery, either. In its simplest form, we go to work and create new worlds — or recreate old ones — with model railroads.” He smiles slightly, gestures at the in-progress model of Montpelier in front of him, stares at it with a look that suggests he can’t wait to get back to building it. “In today’s world, how many people can say they have a job like that?”

Have you ever seen any of Dunham Studios' layouts?