Ken King loves trains.
He's got trains on his hat, shirt, belt, walls and computer. He collects them, photographs them and drives them at work — he's a locomotive engineer for Canadian National.
And after days of high-pressure work hauling 22,000-tonne loads across the nation, what does he do? He goes home and plays with model trains. "It's a good [stress] outlet other than going to the end of the street and yelling at the moon," he says.
King, 53, calls himself a foamer — someone who foams at the mouth for trains. "Even as a little guy, I was always fascinated by trains," he says.
He's since spent thousands of dollars and hours to turn the basement of his St. Albert home into a Kelowna, B.C. train yard, complete with grumbling diesel motors, to-scale box-cars and bustling towns and cities. It's just like the real thing, he says, except you don't need heavy equipment to fix a derailment.
November is National Model Railroad Month and King is one of many local train fans ready to celebrate it. They'll be manning their switches and watching their waybills as they take part in what some call the world's greatest hobby.
The trainmen
Across town, Mark Johnson guides the Monashee Pacific through the mountains of B.C. The tiny emerald engine squeaks and clatters as it rolls past sawmills, breweries, bridges and (peeking out of the trees) Bigfoot.
This is the Edmonton Model Railroad Association's masterpiece: a to-scale reproduction of the planned but never built Monashee Pacific railroad. Featuring 11,000 trees, 11 kilometres of wire, and plenty of cars and buildings, it spreads about 116 meters of track over two floors of a large shed at Fort Edmonton Park — and it's still growing.
The club has been working on the layout since about 1992, says Johnson, who joined the association in 1964. His parents bought him his first train set when he was seven, he says — a gift that led to a 53-year love affair with model rail.
Model trains have been around about as long as locomotives themselves, he says. You had to lathe your own wheels in the real old days; companies such as Lionel popularized pre-fabricated parts and cars during the early 1900s. Today's trains feature realistic weathering, automatic couplers and real lights and sound and are usually made from brass, tin or plastic.
Almost all are built to scale and finely detailed. You can ride the biggest ones, and fit the smallest ones on your finger (or fingernail, in one of the smallest known examples). Older trains are built to 1/48th of life size, Johnson says, or O-scale. Today, most hobbyists prefer the smaller HO-scale ("half-zero," or 1/87th), since it lets them fit more train in the same space.
Model railroading is the world's greatest hobby, Johnson says. "You can go as deep as you want in as many different fields as you want."
Some hobbyists just like to display their trains or run them on a track, for example, while others spend hours making sure their landscapes are historically accurate. Some do nothing but make trees and landscapes; others create computer models to track the profit margins of delivery runs.
St. Albert's Tim McEachern specializes in customization. An estimator with Mammoet Construction, he spends hours disassembling, painting, gluing and modifying his models to reproduce the huge tanks, pipes and reactors his company puts on the rails.
He's always liked to build, he says, when asked why he does this, and used to model cars, boats and planes as a kid. "The trains have become a way of moving them around."
Most modellers focus on fine detail. Ride along the many rails in Jack Slimmon's basement layout in St. Albert, for example, and you'll see families at the lake, lumberjacks in the forest, cats raiding trash cans and bears battling for supremacy — all less than a centimetre tall. Pay attention, and you'll also notice baby deer, fighter planes and dinosaurs. "That's what makes it come alive," he says. "The detail."
All aboard!
Slimmon says this is his fifth model layout, one that King helped design. It's a long way from his first one, which started 30 years ago when he bought one of his kids a train set. The kid grew bored with it; he didn't. "I just liked it!" he laughs.
A realistic plastic locomotive costs about $150, Slimmon says; cars run for about $40 apiece. Lights and sound bring engines up to about $300; brass models can be $1,000. The size of your collection depends on budget and space; he has about 20 engines and 100 cars in his basement yard.
Most layouts will involve months of planning, sketching and drafting, King says. "You have to go slow and easy," he says. "If you rush through something, it's not going to be to the same level of meticulous detail." Designers have to account for the region they're modelling and the number of trains they want to have running at once. A poor design means boredom followed by hammer-work as you tear it down and start over.
Construction starts with a wooden substructure, King says, with track typically laid on a plywood base. (He prefers double-sided insulation tape.) You then craft your hills, valleys and mountains from paint, rock, chicken wire, plaster gauze and coffee grounds. "It's all about being frugal." After that comes wiring, switches, buildings and trains.
Some fans stop there, but others, like King and company, go further and add waybills. These instruction cards are like the quests of a role-playing game, explains Johnson; each bill directs a conductor to ship certain cars to certain locations. Conductors have to shuffle cars around in the yard then plot the most efficient route to deliver them to their destinations — preferably on schedule. "It's like a computer game except with 3D, realistic-looking pieces."
Train fans can spend hours working their way through a waybill, Slimmon says, often with frequent breaks for coffee and chat. "We try to keep it relaxing because it's supposed to be a fun night." Some players will add nuisance trains to run interference or bad-order cards to simulate problems such as busted axels.
Johnson's group often has 25 people running trains at once, some watching the switching yard by video camera, others keeping track of the paperwork. There can be as many as 125 cars on the track at once, he says, all going to different places. "It's very much a team sport."
A labour of love
Model railroading is a labour of love, King says, one that lets him unwind after a nail-biting day of driving a 22,000-tonne train at 100 kilometres an hour. "It gives a guy a lot of things to do. One day I'll be painting the backdrop; the next day, I'm doing a train station." And it gives you an excuse to get together with your buds.
There's always something new you can learn, Johnson adds. "I've learned how to build trees and paint backdrops," he says as an example, while a friend of his learned to build trestle bridges. His club is now learning a lot about beer production in the 1950s — they want to know if their model brewery should have sugar shipped to it.
A child can start with a $10 train set and grow with it for the rest of their lives, McEachern says. "Every little kid loves a train," he says. "A lot of us are still little kids with this."
