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“this area is all correct, topography-wise." He holds a large historical photograph above a section of the tiny track, comparing the details in his layout to those in the picture. "You see, there's a little sign. The drum. The rocks. The broken power pole." He points to a wooden shack the size of an earplug. "Wanna hear something funny? I built this building based on this photo. I figured it was a storage shack. But last week I saw a photo from another angle and you could see a vent right there. It was an outhouse and I've got barrels in there." He cracks an ironic grimace. "I shouldn't have barrels in the outhouse!" 


Sometimes Burgess' efforts to achieve realism surpass spectacle or showmanship and verge on the quixotic. Many of his cars' interiors are fully furnished, though there is no way to see inside them. He lifts the top off a first-class passenger car he "scratch built" over a period of nine months, working 40 hours a week while he was going through a divorce. It has the delicacy and charcoal sheen of a sparrow skeleton. "Full underbody, the tail drum, has the dome and the lights. The gates open, the traps doors open, the windows open, the padded chairs swivel." He flicks the fleck-like parts with the point of a shish kebab stick. 


He says he kept up his 40-hour habit throughout the years when he was raising his two children alone, in addition to his full-time engineering job and a "bunch of girlfriends." "I raised my kids by intercom," he explains. "I just put it on 'Listen' and if they were yelling and screaming, I'd just get on the intercom and say, 'Listen! Back down!'" His well-modulated voice rises to a gnarled bark. I ask him if his children share his fondness for trains. He chuckles and shakes his head.


Nowadays he's a regular slacker, modeling only about 20 hours a week. His new wife, Jacque, who assists him at the civil engineering office for the city of Newark, models her own larger railroad (G gauge) in the backyard. He proudly shows me an article about his wife's layout that includes what he calls the "most liberal photo ever published in Model Railroading." In the photo, Jack and Jacque sit smiling in bathing suits in their bubbling hot tub, while a caboose speeds behind them. 


Like many train fans I would speak to, Jack has difficulty tracing the origin of his passion. "All kids love trains and then it gets suppressed. In the teen years they get into girls and cars and then in their 30s, when they have a family and home, they return to the hobby." 


This narrative of men returning to the primal urge after being led astray by women, jobs and children is echoed again and again in my interviews. It is as if the love of trains is an original instinct derailed by intrusions of obligation. When I ask Burgess where he gets his patience, he interrupts -- a fierce pleasure suddenly glowing in his middle-aged eyes. "I have no patience. Patience is listening to somebody talk really slow, or waiting for somebody to get around to the point, or going shopping with little kids. That takes patience. I work fast. I have to work on something all the time. I can't sit and watch TV." 



Lessons in precision at the hobby shop


David Proud, retail salesman at Franciscan Hobbies in San Francisco and lifelong modeler, is a large man whose shaggy hair and loose-lipped slur give him a boyish innocence so rarely seen in boys these days. Graciously, he shows me around the store, pointing out details of tiny brass locomotives made in Korea, kits for building steel mills and the myriad tiny products that lend authenticity to a layout. He wants me to know that he's pro-woman in model railroading. "It's one of the last bastions of a men-only world. I got my club a little upset at me because I brought women in. They say this is the all-men's thing. I say bull." He's also quick to explain that the few women who are model railroaders "can run circles around most men." 


I try out my newly forming theories about the meaning of trains. How they represent the era when people, communication and goods all arrived on a single road. How later feats of engineering -- cars, planes, phones and the Internet -- shattered the concept of a unified geographical community. That trains were harbingers of this individual mobility, but they also embody the time when technology served as an engine of community cohesion. He glances away and gives a to-each-his-own shrug. When I turn the question on him, he begins emitting data at high speed. "During the '80s there was a resurgence for big steam in the real railroads. You have the 611 and 1213 from Norfolk Western, Union Pacific has gone through so many numbers, the 844 and 8444 and then the 3985. Out here in the West with the Southern Pacific, it was the 4449 ..." 


His answer is incomprehensible, but its truth hits me like a Buddhist koan. It is not the lure of Platonic trainness, but always the thrill of a particular train. Once you experience that, he seems to be telling me, you'll never ask such a silly question again.


I peruse the racks of magazines in the shop. The photos shine forth with luminescent expressivity. Though the layouts depict America's backstage -- steel mills, burnt-out houses, junk yards and train-staging lots -- they transform it into a poignant celebration of men's work. In contrast, the articles seem to be written in code, so loaded are they with technical detail. Every once in a while, however, a paroxysm of joy bursts forth. "Who sez modular layouts are boring?" one article trills. "This one certainly isn't!" The painstaking cuteness of most model railroad scenes hints that beneath their prodigious display of technical skills, these men are playing with the same tender intensity that girls exhibit toward their dolls. They create visionary glimpses of nostalgia -- as if their dreams have already come true. 


The impulse to recreate reality writ small springs from a basic reflex of the human imagination. Miniatures entice us with a God's eye view, satiating our hunger to visually devour the world in a single glance. Even ugly industrial structures are rendered beautiful through shrinkage. Yet unlike infants or kittens, model trains have no enlarged eyes to excite the chemistry of our empathy. So why do trains summon such feelings of love? 


As I wander through the store, a silver-bearded man notices my tape recorder and introduces himself as Will Anderson, former conductor of Southern Pacific, Northern Pacific, Burlingame, Cal Train. "I used to be a manufacturer of model trains," he says. "And I'm going to start again, once I get that damn CAD program running on the computer I made."


"You made a computer?" I ask.


"It's not complicated!" he cries encouragingly. He gives me a lecture on the history of model railroading, from the heyday of Lionel in the Depression to the flourishing of the HO-gauge prototypical models of the present. He takes partial credit for the current trend toward accuracy. In the '70s he stole the blueprints of the rail cars that he operated to make models.


"If I hadn't had a wife who had gotten sick every time I started getting on top, I'd be a wealthy man now."


I can't tell if the strain in his voice is resentment or grief. "Did you do all the work yourself?" I ask.


"Yes, but not by choice. I had a wife at that time. When I said I have to hire someone, she said, 'Oh no you don't! We're going to keep all the money ourselves!'" His eyes narrow and his voice chops the air. "I said, there isn't going to be any money if I don't get somebody in here to do some of this!"


My thoughts loiter with his sickly wife (now presumably dead or divorced) and the difficulty of competing for her husband's affections with this arcane passion. Model railroaders must be hellish to live with. "Pray for me," pleads one bumper sticker, "my husband's a model railroader." When Will begins explaining how to "kit bash" a Standard Pacific passenger into a Great Western parlor ob., I interrupt. "But why? What's the point?"


"I am re-creating part of the reality of my life. There is something exquisitely satisfying about preserving a moment of one's life." 


"But why trains?"


"I have been interested in trains since I was 4. They are huge, impressive. Like a great battering ram. They are an integral part of my life. They are almost my whole life."


I recall Mike Stokinger, the genial treasurer of the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club, who described his love for trains in such different terms. "There's something very soothing, very musical about them. When you're in a train, you're in a cozy enclosed space, you've got movement, this hypnotic hum of sound and it's almost like being in the womb." 




Easy for Leonardo


I want to taste the ecstasy of modeling, so I decide to buy a kit. I choose a building because the little moving wheels on the trains intimidate me. I linger over the "Talc Mill" and the "Burnt-Out Dry Goods Warehouse" but my girlish tastes win out and I buy a "Victorian Row House" (N scale, 1:166). Will assures me it will take no more than an hour to assemble. That night, after nearly eight hours of swearing, sweating and puncturing myself with a steak knife, I pull back to focus on the two-by-one inch plastic house with roof askew and windows murky with dried drips of Elmer's glue. No self-respecting modeler would adorn his layout with this monstrosity. Something about patience, about the earnest determination to get things right, stirs my honor and respect. The work demands a willingness to submit to materials, to the way things must fit together or fall apart. 


Contrary to my fears, I'm discovering that this all-male culture isn't peopled with insensitive brutes or power-hungry patriarchs so much as with the quietly driven makers who have created the material world we live in. They're conservative, yes, but also eccentric and oddly idealistic. They believe in life-long learning, in getting things right. They practice a discipline unrelated to their careers. And they believe in the intimate and important link between personal narrative and community history. 


That history is undeniably backwards-looking. In a country where cars, mass media, computers and social revolutions like the women's movement have shattered the public facade into a million vectors of desire all running on crisscrossing tracks, model railroaders retell the myth of benign, masculine order. When trains provided women and children with the miraculous fruits of men's labor. When industry, like a great, fertile bosom, gave succor.


Still, model trains don't simply represent civilization, industry and the goodness of male know-how. They represent youth and innocence -- lost, then regained at a distance. While the seed of train love is almost always planted in boyhood, it bears fruit in manhood, when affluence, space and technical expertise fuse with a sense of time passing. By the time these men have grown up, little trains mean more to them than big trains ever could. They allow them to recapture one of childhood's greatest pleasures: the ecstatic anticipation of adulthood. 


There is a poignancy to this separate world, this childish universe that fights time and death with tiny train cars, with miniature pigs and dinky sheds. Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that Burgess' Yosemite Valley Railroad is frozen forever in August 1939 -- a month before Hitler's troops crossed the Polish border and shattered a century's innocence.



Plastic rocks, tiny gags and codgers:
A train convention


At a stadium convention hall the train people have come from far and wide to sell, schmooze and show off. Friendly voices blend with the "Big Train Sound" CD into a small-town cacophony. The smell of deep fried food pervades the air. A few Asian and black and female faces speckle the Caucasian male crowd uniformed in pale knits, khakis and baseball caps. A handful of little boys streak between legs, but not many. In one room lies a sea of tables with miniature trains of all sizes, rows of surgical tools, conductor's caps, dental drills, train videos, latex rock formations, foam hillsides and vinyl simulated brick walls. My friend, a Lionel enthusiast, seems almost as bemused as I am by the fanatical extremes of the hobby. Then he spots a yellow New Haven passenger car and lingers there, his eyes suddenly misty. "I love that design," he whispers. "I grew up near those."


In another room, a figure-8 layout called Ferndale Model Railroad has gathered a crowd. Closer inspection reveals a landscape abounding in anachronisms and cultural commentary. In the Western town, two tiny blue disabled parking signs hang on the horse poll and the gallows. In a grove of redwoods an environmental protester has chained herself to the top of a tree and a logger is fixing to chain-saw the tree down. In a fiberglass river gorge, women skinny-dip as a man watches with binoculars. Arabs stand around a Rolls-Royce at a cemetery. In a 1950s town, numerous businesses advertise the modelers sense of humor: Knot Safe Life Jacket, Corporate Ladder Corporation and Sam'n' Nella's Ethnic Cuisine. 


I approach the chunky retiree who's sporting a conductor's cap and operating the train with a series of little switches. Before I can say a word, he grabs my notepad. "There will be a quiz on this." His eyes have the familiar twinkle of my father-in-law when he tells me dirty jokes. "Where's the handicapped parking?"


I reach for my paper. He pulls it away, cackling a bit. Suddenly I don't want to interview him. He probably intends good-humored flirtatiousness, but I feel feminist outrage in all its Calvinist rigidity rising in my marrow. He may be an asshole, he may be a real sweet guy, but there is no doubt of the cultural gorge between us. 


Later, after prefrozen malts and a pile of fries, my friend and I watch a workshop in creating polyurethane rock formations. The men crowd together, taking notes, their eyes as thirsty and innocent as the sponges the guy uses to soak up the liquid plastic. A phrase from Nietzsche flashes through my mind: "Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness he had as a child at play."


Behind me I hear a whistle blow and turn to see a train make its way over a steep mountain pass headed for a little town nestled against an electric power plant all lit up like at night. I move forward and kneel down so that my face is at track level. The little humming universe surrounds me. For a moment I think I can make out laughing voices and the smell of peach cobbler. 


April 2, 1997