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Train gang
Since the 1870s, model-railroad enthusiasts have plied their hobby with varying combinations of craftsmanship and camaraderie, obsessiveness and nostalgia. But all that may be changing.

BY NINA WILLDORF


ABOUT 20 MOSTLY middle-aged men are milling around a second-floor loft in Roslindale Center. A few are toying with tangles of wire while crouched beneath hip-height platforms that run the length of the large space. Some are intently fiddling with knobs on what look like walkie-talkies. Others are taking X-Acto knives and paintbrushes to cardboard. Make your way to the back room, and you’ll meet up with 12 guys boisterously haranguing each other, waiting for a pizza delivery.

Come here on any Wednesday night and this is exactly what you’d find. Welcome to the clubhouse for the Bay State Society of Model Engineers, a 33-year-old organization devoted to building, running, and, well, building yet more model railroads.

Jack Harris, 62, the club’s current president, got here at about noon — seven and a half hours early for the weekly meeting. " We have a saying, " he says with a grin. " The only thing that can keep you away is a death in the family. " Beat. " Your own. "

Bob McLaughlin, 60, the club’s former president, erupts into whole-belly laughter. " I told members of my family that they can’t die on a Wednesday night, " he says. " My grandmother tested me. She was waked on a Wednesday night. "

Well, did pay his respects? " Yup. Then I came here. Hey, the wake was over by nine o’clock. " He shrugs and smiles. " What can I tell ya? "

Roslindale’s model railroaders have plenty of company in their obsession. Around 1.25 million people worldwide count model railroading as a hobby, 250,000 of them in the US; a little more than a quarter of those live in the Northeast. According to a 1998 study, 97 percent of them are men, most between 55 and 64. (Roslindale’s club has only two female members — out of 50.) All over town, these guys are fussing over tiny cities, exchanging model-train lingo and lore, and dreading the intrusion of a carelessly destructive elbow. In fact, the Boston area is home to the largest mail-order miniature-train business in the US: Charles Ro, in Malden. The 30,000-square-foot store is the country’s largest Lionel train dealer.

To those who’ve never modeled, the appeal can be hard to understand. Even within the world of hobbies, it’s sort of a mystery, says Steven Gelber, author of Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (Columbia, 1999): " It falls between categories. " Among model-train enthusiasts, a baseball-card collector’s impulse to gather is combined with the craft skill of the most earnest basket-weaving Martha Stewart devotee, the technological pluck of the short-wave-radio fanatic, the hands-on know-how of the carpenter, and the nostalgia of the Civil War re-enactor. Best of all, there’s no need ever to be finished. There’s always more rust to paint on bridges, more people to add to the station platform, more track to lay down. " The more serious a model railroader becomes, the more difficult [he] wants to make it, " says Gelber.

Like the virtual worlds created by computer games such as SimCity, the world along the model-train tracks is a version of the real one, a place to play God. A model-train layout constructed just so can be the one place where a modeler has absolute control. Harris, for example, is the former director of transportation for the City of Brookline; but here, far from the Green Line’s C trains, the cars always run on time. McLaughlin, who retired as director of special education for the City of Boston, spells out the appeal. " You can imagine — I had 12,000 kids I had to be concerned about, " he explains. " I had to deal with all of the issues of federal and state law, concerns of parents, fiscal responsibilities. I came in here and could lose myself. "

RAILROAD " MINIATURISTS, " as they are sometimes called, are primarily obsessed with building trains consistently to scale. The most popular is the HO scale (following a ratio of 1:87), though the average person is probably more familiar with the larger G scale (1:22.5) " garden " layouts that tote kids around at amusement parks.

But the most devoted model railroaders are concerned with far more than trains and tracks. " Freelance " hobbyists will construct everything to scale — not only the railroad, but trees, buildings, and people, too. " Prototypic " modelers take their zeal even further: their trains make the same runs that real trains made on a particular day in the past. " It’s very time-sensitive, " says McLaughlin. " Each car is identified by number. So [a dispatcher would] say, ‘Go pick up the State of Maine car number 3548,’ " he explains, holding up a small, rusty-looking locomotive stenciled with the words state of maine. " This would typically be carrying potatoes, State of Maine potatoes. You’d pick it up here. You’d be told to deliver that to a specific location. "

Within the world of freelance modeling, things can get even more intricate in a self-explanatory sub-niche called " super-detailing. " George Sellios of Peabody is king of that field. Since 1985, the soft-spoken 52-year-old has devoted three months of each year to his model-train layout, which he unveils once a month to fans who come in droves, armed with camcorders and technical questions. The 23-by-42-foot structure is an impeccably rendered model of a city circa 1935, built around a railroad he calls the Franklin and Manchester. It includes hundreds of buildings and thousands of people, including such touches as a man scrunched under a Model T fixing his muffler. There is even a wrong side to Sellios’s tracks, a skid row.

Sellios’s model railroad became famous almost as soon as he began building it. " The guy’s a real artist, " says a marketing executive at Kalmbach Publishing, which puts out the trade magazine Model Railroader. " He’s like the most famous — the best — model railroader in the country, " says Allen Keller, who produces a series of model-railroading videos and runs a three-day seminar on the subject once a year. Thirteen years ago, after Sellios had finished the first section of his layout, he became the worthy subject of one of Keller’s hour-long instructional home videos — the first of two. The 1988 film plays like Martha Stewart for men. It includes mini seminars on Sellios’s crafting techniques, with mesmerizing devotion to minutiae. Wearing a precariously perched toupee and speaking in a strong Boston accent, Sellios explains his passion for model trains. " I had a tremendous desire to create a miniature world, " he says of his worn buildings, harbors, and little burned-out storage sheds. And he wants to help others do so, too: in that spirit, Sellios not only helped with Keller’s videos, he also founded Fine Scale Miniatures, a local company that builds kits for the do-it-for-me set.

If Sellios, with his " freelance urban layout, " is the king of super-detailing, the Model Engineers Club in Roslindale prides itself on offering members three separate layouts — all of them " prototypical rural and small-town. " The club’s 4000-square-foot loft space houses a transcontinental railroad, with a few perfectly scaled-down 1950s-era towns along the route; there’s even a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air parked at one of the train stations. It’s fall in one town — Summit, Colorado — and the aspen trees have turned from green to yellow. In another layout, a New England railroad passes over a bridge, and underneath a swimmer in an inner tube lolls in the water. A larger-scale layout houses everything the modelers couldn’t construct for the other two, including a tiny version of historical Roslindale.

There’s also yet another niche, as you’ll find if you visit MIT’s model-railroad group, the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). No surprise, its specialty is electronics, hardware, and computers. The club’s small room, on the second floor of an unassuming building on Mass Ave, houses none of the detailed grandeur of Sellios’s work, or the diversity of the Roslindale club’s layouts. But it’s the only place in town where you’ll find two trains running on the same track in opposite directions at different speeds. It’s the only club that runs its trains entirely by computer. It’s the only place where an old telephone operator’s switchboard is used to switch the tracks.

Trains are " basically something to make a control system for, " says James Knight, a cowlicked 21-year-old engineering master’s student who looks a little like a mix of Bill Gates and Alfred E. Neuman. Decked out in cargo shorts, a baggy red T-shirt that reads high tech camp, and Tevas that display toenails painted in metallic purple, Knight punctuates his sentences with something between a laugh and a gasp. He points out the club’s latest electronic project, a chip he’s helped develop to modernize its switching system. The club has created an impressive design in which small segments of track are powered individually, to allow trains to run at different speeds on the same track. The old ’50s-era phone-relay system they’ve been using — a blackboard-size apparatus that erupts into rapid-fire clicks and crackles as the power switches from one segment to another — will be replaced with six of Knight’s small, beeper-size chips.

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Issue Date: August 2 - 9, 2001