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  • Playing with Trains: A Passion beyond Scale
  • Rudi Volti (bio)
Playing with Trains: A Passion beyond Scale. By Sam Posey. New York: Random House, 2004. Pp. xiv+217. $21.95.

Over a stretch of sixteen years, Sam Posey invested six thousand hours in the construction of an HO-scale (3.5 millimeters = 1 foot) version of the long-defunct Colorado Midland Railroad, at times putting in twelve-hour days for several weeks running. Supplementing his efforts were the services of a carpenter and an electrician, along with those of a professional modeler who helped with track work, structures, and numerous details. He also employed, no doubt at considerable expense, a contractor who repositioned a column that had been blocking the view of a cliff with detailed rock work, a project that had absorbed many hours. What accounts for the willingness to spend a considerable amount of time, money, and energy on such an endeavor? Surely it is not what the tongue-in-cheek title states; what we have here is a passion that goes far beyond "playing with trains."

Sam Posey's narrative of his model-railroading adventures begins with his early childhood and a wooden train set, followed by a Lionel layout that his mother wired. After a few disappointing efforts of his own, he abandoned model trains for many years, until the birth of his first son prompted him to retire from his career as a race-car driver. Not coincidentally, these two major life events also revived his interest in model railroading.

While never presenting a fully articulated analysis of the source of the enthusiasms that energized his efforts, Posey drops a few hints along the way. An art major in college, he is most strongly attracted to the artistic aspects of the hobby, and several pages are devoted to other model railroads noted for their dramatic scenery, such as John Allen's legendary Gorre and Daphetid and the Southwest-themed layout built by Malcolm Furlow that verges on the surrealistic. And it is Furlow who makes the strongest claim to model railroading being an art form: "A model train layout can be art. . . . It's sculptural. It has composition. It evokes a mood—there's an emotional response" (p. 150). This is a defensible claim, as it can be argued that, from Paleolithic times to the present, all of the visual arts have centered on the creation of models of some sort, small-scale representations of a reality too vast to be comprehended in all its fullness. More's the pity, then, that Posey's modeling art is so skimpily presented in the pages of the book; there [End Page 473] are only two photographs of his version of the Colorado Midland, one that appears on the book's inner cover and flyleaf, another on the dust jacket that shows the author with a small segment of the layout.

A second explanation for the appeal of model railroading can be summed up in the word "control." For a former race driver, the appeal of "power without effort" (p. 11) is evident, but more significant is a model railroad's capacity to provide its builder and operator with a space that can be planned, ordered, and dominated. Posey describes his first Lionel layout as "a world to escape into, in which everything was under control" (p. 6). Much later, the basement walls that encompassed his version of the Colorado Midland "represented stability that had been lacking in my life upstairs. I was back in control." More than a replica of the real thing (which had been abandoned in 1918), Posey's model railroad had become its own reality.

In the second half of the book, Posey shifts the focus from his own model railroading efforts and describes visits to other modelers' layouts, which leads to his observation that model railroaders tend to fall into two camps: builders of scenic tableaux like himself, and operators who try to replicate prototypical railroad operations, often as a group activity that requires elaborate operating schemes, fast-time-clocks, and a multitude of operators to keep everything running on schedule. He takes a look at the economics of a hobby...

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