Electric trains began as little boys’ toys, but they have long fascinated – even obsessed – grown men and consumed great gobs of their time and money.
One such man is Sam Posey. When he became a father in 1982, he decided to build a modest layout for his son, John, in the basement of their suburban Connecticut home.
As Posey describes in his book, “Playing With Trains,” the simple project that began as a 4-by-8-foot piece of plywood with a little HO-gauge engine running around on an oval of track somehow became a 16-by-50-foot miniature empire that took 16 years of planning, researching and building.
When Posey, a professional race car driver and TV sports commentator, was a boy in postwar New York, his mother, a cabinetmaker, wired a modest train layout for him. (Posey’s father had died in combat during World War II.) During the period, there were two major manufacturers of electric trains: American Flyer and Lionel.
Young Sam’s trains were Lionel, which had one glaring drawback. Its track “was flawed: instead of a realistic two-rail system, Lionel had three rails. The third rail provided the current from the transformer and simplified the wiring of the layout, but it looked awful.”
A distaste for Lionel track – three silver rails mounted on three black metal ties – is common among the model railroaders Posey visits and confers with throughout his project.
In the first part of the book, Posey chronicles the building of his model railroad, which he based on a real one built in Colorado in the late 19th century. The project grows to involve not only Posey’s son, daughter and wife, but other modelers, who offer advice and ideas. One of them, a hobby shop clerk named Rolf, becomes a fixture in the Posey basement as he contributes invaluable instructions as well as skillful planning and building.
But for Posey, the project becomes an obsession. He unplugs the phone, often doesn’t bother to change clothes, and doesn’t stop working except to eat. He even works on Christmas.
When it’s decided that a pole – one supporting the first floor of his house – is obstructing a view of the layout, Posey has it moved. He develops Parkinson’s disease, whose symptoms he learns to “ignore” as he builds his railroad.
And around the fourth year, as the layout nears what he thinks will be its completion, he feels “a void. A sense of loss. Building the railroad … had been a wonderful part of my life, and I didn’t want it to end, at least not yet.”
It didn’t.
In the second part of the book, Posey visits modelers and industry people in several states and tries to uncover the reasons for the hobby’s appeal – nostalgia for childhood or for train travel, perhaps, or the desire to be “master” of one’s miniature domain.
It’s quite possible that the postwar Lionel layout Posey’s mother made for him included some of the trains and accessories pictured in “Legendary Lionel Trains” by John A. Grams and Terry D. Thompson, longtime toy train enthusiasts and authors of dozens of books and articles about the hobby.
Although the coffee-table book’s 140 color photos illustrate examples of products from every era of the century-old company’s history, the focus is on Lionel’s peak years, the 1940s and 1950s.
Posey and other model railroad purists might be pleased to see that most of the rolling stock has been photographed without that unrealistic Lionel track it was designed to run on. The trains are what matter here, and even the track that’s so unsightly to so many could not detract from their appeal.
The text provides a summary of Lionel history, beginning in 1901 with the first car, a gondola designed for a store display and not for consumers, through the growth of the company, its innovations, and its decline and recent comeback.
But the photos – even without captions, which would have been welcome – are the stars of this book. There’s that first train, the 15-inch-long wooden gondola designed as an attention-getter for displaying items in store windows. It got attention all right – many shoppers wanted to buy the train instead of the product it was displaying!
The public demand for the car put Lionel, then a manufacturer of miscellaneous electrical gizmos, into the toy train business.
Another rare specimen: a handmade prototype of the first Lionel O-gauge train from 1915, a black electric-profile locomotive with baggage and passenger cars. The locomotive and passenger cars went into production, but there is no evidence that the baggage car was ever produced.
Other images show a series of windup handcars with Disney characters made in the mid-1930s; a scaled-down model of New York’s Grand Central Terminal (a scale model, the authors write, “would have rivaled a sofa in size”), produced during the 1930s and 1940s; and a page from the 1935 catalog displaying a bright red windup Mickey Mouse circus train, with locomotive, three cars and cardboard scenery, “complete, $2.00.”
The book gives appropriate homage in text and photos to the two stars in Lionel’s roundhouse. One is the company’s “crowning achievement,” a highly detailed New York Central Hudson steam locomotive, a “masterpiece of model making” produced in 1937 in exact scale to attract serious model railroaders.
The other is the red-and-silver Santa Fe diesel, Lionel’s most popular locomotive, shown in three versions – one each from 1948, 1996 and 2003 – that reveal only subtle differences in body structure and markings.
The trains and accessories, beautifully photographed, threaten to create pangs of nostalgia in anyone, model railroader or not, whose fondest memories include electric trains zipping around – and occasionally falling off – a circle of track under the family’s Christmas tree.
“Playing With Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale” by Sam Posey; $22.95.
“Legendary Lionel Trains” by John A Grams and Terry D. Thompson; $29.95.
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