Dylan Ervin, senior, stands in his hat amongst students at KHS.
Dylan Ervin
St. Louis Community College – Meramec
Art and Design
Engine purring, wheels turning, tracks burning. All aboard the Dylan Ervin Train.
Dylan Ervin, senior, loves anything and everything about one thing: trains. Trains have consumed his everyday lifestyle, from the people he knows to his signature engineer’s hat he wears on a daily basis.
“As far back as I can remember, my grandfather would take me up to the box company in Kirkwood, and we would sit and wait for trains to pass together,” Ervin said. “The complex machinery of [trains] and the ingenuity is really intriguing, and I’m a big fan of the size of them.”
Not only does Ervin enjoy train watching and building models for himself, but he also uses his passion as a way to give back to the community. Ervin said that the work his club does is a great way to get kids and people to learn about trains.
“I’m involved in a model railroading club called the Mississippi Valley End Scalers” — Dylan Ervin
Ervin said. “[The club has] a big layout and we go to train shows all around and run shows with the public.”
His long time friend, Benjamin Lowry, senior, met Ervin in fourth grade at North Glendale Elementary. Lowry says that Ervin hasn’t always been interested in trains, it was the military.
“His obsession with trains started freshman year,” Lowry said. “He used to be big on military history and then shifted into trains because it’s something to engage [and] can go out and see.”
Not only have trains been a lifelong endeavor of Ervin’s; he also uses it as a form of expression. Ervin said he will undoubtedly be seen walking the halls on a daily basis in his engineering hat.
“It gets commonly misconstrued as a conductor’s hat, which it isn’t,” Ervin said. “I started wearing the engineer’s hat back in 2020 during the Zooms, when [my hair] grew really long and I needed something to contain it. I popped on a hat that was big enough to cover my ears, but not too low like a baseball cap and it just stuck.”