I don’t normally write about trains. I suppose there are a few reason for this. Partlly the fact I don’t have that much knowledge of them, mostly because my interest isn’t what you might expect. Then there is the stigma.
There is this stereotype that trains, especially or including model trains, are a common special interest of neurodivergent individuals and so part of me wants to distance myself from that. Not because I don’t want people to know I am neurodivergent, that’s fine if they know. Rather it’s what specifically interests me about the hobby of model trains that I wanted to discuss. You see it has very little to do with the trains themselves.
As long as I can remember I have had an obsession not with trains, but towns. Specifically the makeup and layout of towns. This partially fueled my desire to enthusiastically volunteer for the city beat when it became available at my last newspaper job. I wasn’t interested in the prestige of covering City Hall nor was I that interested in having discussions with politicians, police chiefs or city leaders.
What I was most excited for was attending P&Z meetings, Economic Development Board meetings, and yes even School District meetings. I was especially excited to cover school districts that were planning to build new facilities. This is what sparked my interest in the HO scale Model Train hobby.
I was in first grade the first time I saw the film Beetlejuice by Tim Burton. While I was absolutely fascinated by the macabre story, the gothic lead character and the supernatural misadventures of the mischievous title character himself, the one aspect of the movie that really got my attention was the model of the town.
You see I didn’t initially go into “model trails” with any interest in trains whatsoever. Even today I have no more than a passing interest in them as a piece of Americana, not so much machines of industry. No, I started my journey on the path of model trails simply so I, too, could build my own model town as seen in that movie.
For the first half of my childhood I thought it was a pipedream. I cobbled together simple houses out of cardboard and dressed them with paper mache as seen in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors. I lived in a very rural part of Kansas with no access to hobby or toy stores. The entire existence of Model Trains and the accompanying model kits was beyond my kid brains comprehension.
At first I got my town building fix by way of the PC video game Sim City which I played obsessively after school in our then state-of-the-art computer lab. It was the early 90s and computers weren’t quite commonplace in every school yet.
So I would spend hours in that lab designing my own cities using the primitive game software that was available to me at the time. I always stayed until the staff were kicking me out to lock the doors for the night. To call it an obsession would be an understatement.
Two years later I was able to take my city building dreams to a new level. I was finally able to buy myself a Super Nintendo game console, along with a copy of the SNES game cartridge version of the Sim City game. Now I could build my cities well into the wee hours of the night. While it was a fine distraction for the time, it was still not going to satisfy my true desire to build my own model town.
Over the years I began another unrelated but comparable obsession. The infamous board game Monopoly. While I wasn’t that attracted to the fighting that playing the game with my sisters always led to nor the core game play of trading property and paying rent. No, what really appealed to me was simple buying a Monopoly just so I could build houses and hotels.
My goal was never to win the game. My sisters figured this out as I would often mortgage properties or make the dumbest trades just to get a monopoly to build on. Usually I would end up losing the game just a few short rounds later. I never cared about playing the game on its own merits. It was simply a primitive method to get my building houses fix.
Then my world changed. It was my 13th birthday. My parents took me to a department store I had never been to before. It was a 2 story building that had the standard clothes and houseware on the ground floor. Down the stairs to the basement level suddenly you entered a massive toy and hobby area. Bikes, Super Soakers, action figures, dolls and every other item that would interest a kid was there. In the very back of the store was the hobby section.
While at first glance it was just the standard bottle rockets, yarn, Ertle Models and the like, in the furthest corner was a section that caught my eye. Sitting on the shelf among model train cars, trees, tracks and other terrain products was a whole host of building. Everything from farm houses, churches, police stations, and more. My eyes glossed over as I finally found what I had spent my whole childhood dreaming about. I could finally start building my model town.
It didn’t take long to discover this new found hobby was known colloquially as model railroading. My first clue was the clerk dressed like train conductor. I could have probably over looked that if not for the Model Railroad magazines and product catalogs lining the end caps of those aisles. I knew I wasn’t interested in the trains side of things, just the layout side.
Yeah I would pick up a few trains and tracks along the way but for no other reason than to add flare to my town, not because the trains were important to me. In fact over the years I made it a point to keep the trains at the edge of town, never allowing them to become the focus. I wasn’t even that interested in the locomotives. I just wanted to finally have that scaled down miniature town in my life, loosely inspired by Beetlejuice.
Today I write this as a way to remember that while I do, in fact, partake in a hobby that resembles Model Railroading to outsiders, the truth is as with so many things in my life, I walked along my own path just adjacent to the more popular path. Once again I found myself interested in something close to what others were interested in but just slightly different for my own reasons.
My obsession with city building lives on. I play other games beyond just Sim City. various Roblox Tycoon games, The Sims family and I even have a Minecraft Creative Mode world save dedicated just to building my own city. I never gave a crap about trains. I just explored the model railroad hobby only as much as I needed to satisfy my true desire.
Stephanie Bri 