How I Became a Model Railroader

(A lot of this is very "inside baseball" for model railroaders. You've been warned.)

Like a lot of model railroaders, I was introduced to trains as a young child. There were the toys, like the train that dragged a hammer over ties that sounded musical notes. After that, came battery-powered trains.

Then came the fateful day that an N scale train set appeared on a 4x8 sheet of plywood laid on a pool table in our suburban Chicago home's basement. I don’t remember a whole lot about it; I imagine my non-railroading  parents figured a small child needed small trains.

I was about five years old at the time, so N scale didn’t last long.

But when Dad pulled his childhood Lionel three-rail stuff out of storage, I got very interested. He even had a 4-8-4 scale Hudson, passenger cars, and the orange and blue handcar that changed direction when it bumped something.

Soon the smells of ozone and Lionel’s reliable smoke (from the pills you dropped down the smokestack of a steam engine) filled the basement as my empire took shape.

Dad also found some background pieces with fold-out three-dimensional buildings, so I created my first viewblocks in the middle of the loop of track. I had no idea why this seemed so cool, but it worked. I set up his Plasticville school, church, station and hospital and added figures. The people of Plasticville spent an inordinate amount of time hanging around the tracks, and then being run over by trains—but it gave the hospital plenty of business.

I still remember my first locomotive to run on that three-rail track—mine, not one of Dad’s hand-me-downs. He drove me to Park Lane Hobbies in Calumet City and let me look at the walls full of engines until I picked out a bright orange DT&I SW9; I have no idea why I chose it. Maybe the color caught my eye.

The other major influence on my model train psyche as a kid was the massive O scale Museum & Santa Fe layout at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It was a thing of beauty. Silver streamliners glided around the layout alongside freight trains. You could listen to recorded voices explain railroading through telephone handsets. And you could get a bird’s-eye view from the upper level, a real treat for a short kid.

Looking down on the M&SF

I’m told I never got past the train layout to the rest of the museum for several years’ worth of visits. It was, and is, my inspiration for everything a layout should be, even with its lack of detail and bad design—no one would ever get a close-up view of the Grand Canyon scene in the center of the layout because it was 25 feet away from the edge of the benchwork.

I still loved it, and became an even bigger fan when I learned, as an adult, that it was largely the work of one man, Minton Cronkhite.

The layout gave away, after 60 years, to a modern, HO scale exhibit in 2002. I was crushed when I found out. The new layout’s not the same, and, sadly, I missed the online auctions of the locomotives, rolling stock and structures from the M&SF.

I eventually moved to HO scale myself, mostly with Tyco plastic stuff—the Sears catalog was great for dreaming about train sets and accessories—and I also began reading Model Railroader magazine (first copy: Feb, 1975) and learned about the virtues of Athearn’s well-made locomotives. I was an early adopter of foam scenery for layouts: My parents got me a 4x8 sectional HO scale layout made of Styrofoam in the mid-1970s.  That was great fun—trains climbed hills and went through tunnels. And, I found, plastic cement melts Styrofoam.

Highliners at work. Hmm. They're orange, too.

During all those formative years, I was exposed to real trains in the form of Penn Central, which didn’t stick at all, and the Illinois Central electric commuter trains, which kind of did. I loved to watch them when I visited my aunts and uncles living near downtown.  The game I played was to guess whether the next train would be an old Pullman Green heavyweight train (circa-1930s) or one of the cool new bi-level Highliners that entered service in 1971.

Iowa farmland in N scale

Eventually, I grew up (it took years), and model railroading stayed a part of my life. It’s been a challenge, because I spent many years working in TV news, which meant a life spent moving around the country. I rarely got close to finishing a layout before it was time to tear it down and move.

Rock Island grainger railroading

I did build a fairly complete N scale layout based on the Rock Island in Iowa during the 80s. It was a lot of fun and I


got my first taste of the new Kato GP50 locomotives as a result. I was amazed at how smoothly they ran.

Later, in Rochester, New York, I built a 4x6 HO layout with added shelves, based on North Carolina, which is where I had most recently worked.


Actually, the layout was the Kitty Hawk Central built by Jim Kelly in Model Railroader. This is where I began to hone my interest in the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.

Trains on the beach: Kitty Hawk Central

Over time, I amassed a huge collection of ACL, SAL and other southeastern HO equipment for a planned empire. Boxes and boxes of engines, cars, structure kits—everything I’d need.

Then, after moving it all through three states, I finally got my basement-with-a-house on top in the railroading mecca of Denver, home of Caboose Hobbies, which bills itself as the “World’s Largest Model Train Store.”

I was all ready to get started with my ACL project when my then-Mother-in-law gave me an On30 set based on the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” Christmas TV special. (It’s my favorite. Don’t judge.) That decision launched me on an On30 course.

I was pleasantly surprised at how inexpensive the Bachmann line was—and it ran nice, too. I began collecting and filling my basement with an On30 layout. The HO stuff stayed packed for “someday.”

I learned to handlay On30 track, because I thought it looked better than the regular HO track the trains would run on. (I found out you could get On30 flex, but by then was having fun handlaying.) Kitbashed some cars from the Bachmann rolling stock. I developed my skills as a modeler in Denver.

I loved that layout. It had no scenery, but I would still gaze lovingly at the track and run trains around it.

…until my divorce. She got the house and the basement.

Nowadays, I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Arizona. Still have all that HO equipment in storage, waiting for someday, and it sits next to crates of On30 trains that I can’t bear to sell, either.

I’m building a 2x4 N scale layout based on the ACL in South Carolina. I have come full circle, it seems. I am close to admitting I’ll never have a basement again and that the dream of another large layout is destined to stay a dream.

But not just yet.