t h e p e t e r p a n e x p r e s s
i n s i d e t h e t i n y m o d e l
t r a i n u n i v e r s e , w h e r e
b o y h o o d n e v e r r u n s
o f f t h e t r a c k s
I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y C A L E F B R O W N
BY CAROL LLOYD | a tunnel's black eye stares from a hillside of yellow grasses and balding conifers. Below, along the palm of the valley, a row of cottages lines a single street adjoining a wider avenue with a library, a store, a hotel, a plastics factory and a grain elevator.
But something is amiss. Cars stand frozen in the intersection. The grocer gesturing to the young woman never gets her attention. A dog stalls mid-frolic. Then, from the tunnel, a whistle blows. A locomotive pulling three passenger cars and four coal loads chugs toward the station. Its cyclopian headlight glints against the tracks. Alive, we sigh, alive after all!
I reach out my hand, throwing a giant storm shadow over the entire valley.
Welcome to the world of model railroading, where miniature people, cars, streetlights, trees, windshield wipers, drain pipes, graffiti, guns, chickens, water towers, gravel paths, butane storage tanks, billboards and Coca-Cola machines are assembled to create a tiny plastic setting for electric toy trains. Actually, the word "toy" is misleading, suggesting as it does child's play, not the exacting, time-consuming and expensive hobby that ensnares an estimated 300,000 mostly middle-aged, white American men. (Average age: 47; average income: $45,000-50,000; ratio of women to men: 1 to 99.) Ten years ago the model train world showed signs of irreparable decline; now the $250 million industry boasts hundreds of conventions and 10 monthly full-color magazines as well as a host of black and white 'zines. Tiny vintage locomotives, their prices driven up by collectors, have been known to sell for as much as $27,000.
Andy Sperandeo, editor of "Model Railroader" (circulation: 212,000), traces the model railroad resurgence to baby boomers hitting middle age. "The hobby selects for homeowners," he told me via phone from his office in Waukesha, Wisc. "You get married, you settle down, and then one day find your old train collection in the closet." And the hobby isn't confined to basement-dwelling nerds -- it has its share of celebrity fans, like Frank Sinatra, who commissioned an elaborate layout for his home, and rock legend Neil Young, who built a layout for his son, who suffers from cerebral palsy. (Two years ago, Young fulfilled a "lifetime dream" by becoming a part owner of the toy train company Lionel.)
While they once settled for fictional locations and rail lines with more-or-less accurate trains, modern modelers now go to extreme lengths to achieve authenticity. Whether they are working in G (1:22.5), HO (1:88), N (1:166), or the impossibly tiny Z (1:224) gauge, modelers engage in deep studies of the "prototype" (modeler lingo for reality) before they embark on construction. They pore over operation schedules of obscure lines, carry "field guides" in case they sight unusual trains, visit archives and watch hours of videos of defunct train trips copied from old 16mm films. When they are ready to begin building, they order from catalogs like Walther's Inc., which offers over 50,000 tiny plastic trains, people and props, from the "Bedouin family" to "a Welsh corgi" to a set of tiny tombstones. Or they "scratch build" (make their own) or "kit bash" (use the elements of a kit to build something new). Even toy train companies like Lionel and American Flyer have begun to create models closer to prototype to satisfy modelers' voracious appetite for exactitude.
Silver-haired Jack Burgess, one of the gurus of model railroading, has the bloodshot glimmer of a guy who has happily spent a life swimming in tiny eye-hand coordination. From the moment I step inside his suburban home in Newark, Calif., he begins to dispatch facts about the Yosemite Valley Railroad, August 1939. He points to glass-framed artifacts -- commuter books, tickets, passes, train keys, worker grocery credits, maps and photos -- which he has been collecting since 1981, the year he began his current model. Unlike most modelers, who depend upon friends' expertise to help with the electricity or cabinetry, Burgess does everything himself. His history of the Yosemite Valley railway chiefly consists of numbers: the angle of a given incline, the miles, the dates, the train numbers. The figures wash over me like a foreign language. There's no narrative I can follow. This is the old, rote kind of knowledge -- masterful memorization without a rhetorical point.
Burgess ushers me through the "waiting room," an addition he built to accommodate the 250-300 train hobbyists who come from all over the world every year to visit his layout. He regales me with tales of wild nights when fellow modelers come over for "operating sessions" to reenact the train schedule of a given day in August 1939. In his train room, a sleekly converted garage with plush carpeting, a calendar of that month and year hangs on the wall next to a working telephone of the period. Soon he'll change the phone number to the same one the 1939 Yosemite Valley station had. Prerecorded birds squeak under the fluorescent lights as he walks me through an exquisite layout of bungalows, old Fords, steam locomotives and rough California landscape. He explains the source of each intricate detail: interviews of men in rest homes, historical photos, geological surveys, botany studies, train operating schedules. The more he talks, the more I feel like I'm going to pass out. Funes, the Borges character who is plagued by a perfect memory, has nothing on this guy.
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