Not long ago I heard on the radio about a convention of model railroaders that was being held at Union Station in Ogden. I called around the neighborhood to see if anyone was interested in driving up to it with me, but at such short notice the only person who took me up on it was Roger.
I can usually count on Roger for such ventures. An avid collector of McDonald's Happy Meal boxes and hand-painted ties pre-dating the Eisenhower administration, he was eager to come along as long as we could run a few errands on the way, which was fine by me. We might not be killing two birds with one stone, but at least we would be throwing two rocks at the same time.With such sketchy details, it was hard to tell if the affair would be up to much, but as we neared the station we could tell we were in for a grand affair just from the masses of parked cars and the crowds of people.
The next couple of hours were spent in ecstatic oblivion as we wandered the halls, studying layouts of trains in all sizes and types. Apparently, there are clubs of model train enthusiasts all over the place. They use conventions like this to show off their individual layouts, which are designed to be laid end-to-end in continuous spans of tiny towns and country settings in a huge circle that fills the entire exhibition space.
It didn't take long to notice that model railroaders have a language of their own, steeped in jargon describing everything from track size to the kind of tweezers used to assemble tiny box cars, or what kind of paints are used to make the tiny hills, tunnels, trestles and bridges look so realistic.
I was reminded (and maybe this is why going there was so intriguing) of when I was a kid and how I used to go up on the hill behind our house and look out over Alpine and study the landscape and imagine how it would be to set aside a secret part of the hill to build a model of the town, so detailed that it would include every house and outhouse.
Then when people would change things, like building an addition to their house, or putting in a garden or a fence, I could scurry up to my model city and make the same changes that were being made in the real world.
Looking back on it, I can't quite decide whether the infatuation with such a scheme indicated a passion to become like God, all-powerful and in control of a world in microcosm, or whether it was just indicative of an insecure kid who wanted to feel a sense of control by building a mini-world that seemed more responsive than the real one - a sort of avoidance of reality, maybe.
At any rate, I never built my city on the hill.
I sensed, though, the other day with the mini-railroaders varying degrees of perspective in their having created such a mini-world. On the one hand, many seemed to be just happy hobbyists, challenged by the skill, patience and pure fulfillment derived from their efforts. At the same time, I sensed in others something else, more difficult to pinpoint, which had to do with the kinds of emotions evoked by studying tiny worlds.
Theirs was more of an aesthetic feeling, in a way, a flipping of the mind to picture things both as what they "are" and "aren't" simultaneously, a marveling at just the sight and movement of tiny locomotives, and tiny streets and buildings with plastic people tucked into every corner, digging ditches and pushing baby strollers and directing matchbox traffic on plaster-of-Paris streets, and imagining them as real.
I even bought a tiny engine from a wizened exhibitor from Grand Junction who was there with his wife, a patient lady who seemed to love model railroads as much as he did. The train I settled on was a tiny Rio Grande steam engine from the early 1900s, which I set up as soon as I got home with an oval of clip-together E-Z track laid out on the kitchen counter. I also bought a log car, a gondola and a Burlington flat car with tiny sides that will perfectly hold three of the tiny green matchbox tractors that I bought at the John Deere dealership in Lindon a couple of summers ago.
At 36 inches wide, the track tended to hang over 500-foot precipices, dropping dangerously on one side into Kitchen Tile Canyon, and on the other side into the somewhat softer carpet terrain of Family Room Gulch. With the protective cushioning of three bar stools on one side, and the slide out breadboard landing strip and roll-out knife-and-fork drawer roundhouse on the other side, I felt fairly confident that my tiny engineer and brakemen would not be too badly injured in the event of a derailment.
Veloy and Andrew were both patient with the setup for a meal or two, but last night I felt impelled to pull it apart and tuck it into a more inconspicuous corner. I am now scratching my head to try to figure out a place to set it up in the studio.
Maybe I can fashion a dugway over on Bookshelf Mountain somewhere, and throw a span of plywood onto Coffee Table Flat. It would be a bit inconvenient. But I could live with that.
By the way, did I mention that the engine has a real headlight that shines in the dark? At night, I could come down here after the 10 o'clock news and watch the evening train come into town to the tune of "A Little Night Music" by Mozart.