A Whistle-Stop World April 11, 2002 By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON A 13-YEAR-OLD lives inside Richard Roman, 32. And the 13-year old employs him. Mr. Roman, a sandy-haired soccer jock, jumped into the cab of his blue Ford F-550 recently, a pickup truck the size of a locomotive, and drove to the top of the cliffs of Dover, N.J., to show off the view from his new house. Dover, an 18th-century town, population 18,000, sat nested between the hills like a toy train set: hospital, school, factory. A train pulled into the train station. Mr. Roman's company, East Coast Enterprises, builds toy-train and model railroading layouts for hobbyists and collectors. He started designing and constructing layouts professionally when he was 13. "At night, when the lights come on, I see this," said Mr. Roman, psyched, standing by his idling truck, his house behind him. He swept his gaze over Dover, now an O-gauge panorama. "I see my railroads. This is the ideal functioning town that time forgot about for a while." Today, everyday, the news is good. In Mr. Roman's machine shop, mounted on plywood, small-town America, with its small-town values, is alive and well. Mr. Roman builds it: an emblematic vision of a simpler time and a purer place that Americans started to recapture in popular culture as it started to slip their grasp. On Main Street, the windows are clean, not shattered. Workmen wash them, day in and day out. Mailmen face dogs, not anthrax. Children swing toward skies without planes. The nation travels by train, and the trains are on time. The universe is ordered. Life is accountable. What goes around comes around quickly when the world is 12 by 24 feet. There is no suburban sprawl. There isn't the space. More than nostalgia for trains or toys, what lives on in Mr. Roman's towns is nostalgia for a way of life. "It's a perfect, peaceful place, it's safe," said Mandy Patinkin, the performer, of the town Mr. Roman created for Mr. Patinkin's layout, which is modeled on Creed, Colo., a mountain town where Bat Masterson was once the marshal. Mr. Patinkin, 49, got his first toy train as an 8-year-old. "They want Pleasantville," Mr. Roman said. It is a hometown, dear to remember, that might never have existed. Mr. Roman, who studied engineering, is not an architect, an urban planner or a developer, but he designs and creates three to four towns, with landscapes, every year. He employs a three-man crew; several freelance kit builders and painters; his wife, Dione; and his father, Geza. He knows, technically, that an O-gauge train like Lionel will climb only a 2 percent grade with ease on a track. He also knows, conceptually, what makes a town viable. "It's a packaging issue, just like my railroads," he said. "The type of housing that would be next to the railroad, zoning and industry, nice neighborhoods where the trains wouldn't be allowed." On Mr. Roman's larger layouts, there is a wrong side of the tracks, with working-class hotels and union halls. "And the features of a town," he said. "Firemen fighting fires, a cop writing somebody a ticket." A town is its people. Mr. Roman buys them - pewter nuns, brides and bridegrooms, sailors and painted "painted ladies" - from suppliers like Arttista Accessories in Delaware. Part Robert Moses, part Robinson Crusoe, part Freud, Mr. Roman, with a Hewlett-Packard laptop; RR-Track, a hobbyist's software; and his hands, must realize working municipalities from the uncharted childhood islands in the minds of grown men. Mr. Roman's clients include policemen and criminal defense attorneys, eye surgeons and electricians. Layouts range from 75 to 2,000 square feet. They average $100 to $200 a square foot, depending on the "intensity of detail," Mr. Roman said. Toy-train and model railroad hobbyists number no more than 350,000, spending an estimated $400 million annually, according to the Kalmbach Publishing Company, which publishes magazines like Classic Toy Trains and Model Railroader. But they are a powerful, imaginative lobby for a version of American life that hasn't existed since the late 1950's and early 60's, when the national railroads' steam engines were retired, the interstate highways were built, air travel became common and the great golden age of locomotion and riding the rails rolled to a stop. Things were different then, a perception that will never dim in the celluloid-window-lighted towns of O- and HO-gauge trains. Mr. Roman said that in the wake of the events of September, he expected his fanciful business to stumble. In fact, clients put a rush on orders. Suppliers, like track makers and switch makers, reported shortages. Lionel, the 102-year-old toy-train manufacturer that was acquired in 1995 by an investment group that includes Neil Young, the rock singer, reported a 40 percent increase in sales in the last six months. "Guys wanted their trains," said Mr. Roman, who has no clients that are women. "They can go into their train rooms and close the door, and the world is under control." It is now predominantly an adult's hobby, a fact the industry is recognizing and catering to with reissues and collectibles, and events like the Train Collectors Association meet in York, Penn., on April 19 and 20. The most popular era recreated in hobbyists' layouts is the 1950's, the era during which the romance of the railroads disappeared like a mighty cloud of steam into the air, and with it the familiar landscape of America. Ray and Charles Eames, the designers, made a homage to trains using toys in 1957. "Toccata for Toy Trains" is a 14-minute film of a trip through town and country with music by Elmer Bernstein, inspired by the filmmaker Billy Wilder's gift of a toy locomotive to Charles Eames. "Railroads built the towns, as they moved inland from the coasts," said Thomas H. Garver, the author of "The Last Steam Railroad in America," a book of photographs by O. Winston Link, who documented the last days of the Norfolk & Western Railway in the 1950's, as it sped - a 60-mile-an-hour fire-breathing steel cortege - through the small mining towns of West Virginia. Mr. Garver will be the curator of a museum dedicated to Link's work, which will be housed in the train station in Roanoke, Va., designed by Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer who streamlined the Pennsylvania Railroad's steam engines in the 1930's into cosmopolitan rocket ships. "If you look at those towns now, they're shells," Mr. Garver said, explaining the lure of reclaiming their memory with a model railroad. Mr. Roman uses Link's photographs as source material in setting his scenes. For the small-town residents, many of whom moved to cities in the 1950's, the railroad was a way in and a way out, a whistle wailing through at night like the siren of a wider world, inviting adventure. "The steam whistle is a beautiful sound," Mr. Garver said. There is a noir quality, too, to the railroad's transient presence in a town, like the arrival of a stranger, which has not escaped hobbyists. What layout builders like Mr. Roman call the icons of American life in miniature, available through the mom and pop businesses that produce them, like Downtown Deco in Montana - the milk-loading platforms, the grain elevators, the Grecian temple banks, the men in suits kissing their wives and walking to work - also include the typical small town's secrets: detective agencies, pawn shops and hobos sleeping, with newspapers over their faces, under a tree. They weren't yet the homeless. Boxcars were their homes. "They forget polio and bomb shelters," said Tony Koester, a model railroader in Newton, N.J., speaking of fellow hobbyists. Mr. Koester, 59, is part of a growing movement of model railroaders who, working as preservationists and historians, are creating accurately scaled, extensively researched layouts that are time- and place-specific. "I remember sitting on the roof as a Cub Scout, looking for Russian bombers," he said. "And I lost a friend to polio." Mr. Koester's layout reproduces the fall of 1954, in scenery, and the St. Louis run of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railway, called the Nickel Plate Road. "I grew up in a little town in west Indiana called Cayuga," he said. "My dad ran the brickyard. We left in 1958." The Nickel Plate Road came through town, still with steam. "They hiss and snort and puff," said Mr. Koester, as if he were a boy describing a dragon. "That's the only thing that's going to be on my tombstone: `Model Railroader.' " Several weeks ago, Mr. Roman visited Joanne and Wayne Weiner in Randolph, N.J. Mr. Weiner is a client. Mr. Weiner led Mr. Roman down carpeted steps into the basement of his suburban home. It got louder as they went down. Mr. Weiner had been careful to start running his trains before Mr. Roman arrived. They were racing and revolving and taking the straightaways, through the blinking crossings and over the trestled bridges - boys swimming in the river below - of his town, no one else's, alive with activity. For anyone who was a boy in the 1950's or 60's, the loud, metallic sound is like time rushing back into a can. "Classic," Mr. Roman said, looking up from the next step down. Mandy Patinkin recalled showing his 88-year-old uncle his layout, which is at his house in upstate New York. "We grew up on the South Side of Chicago," Mr. Patinkin said. "We were in the scrap metal business, which is the junk business - the Peoples Iron and Metal Company." Mr. Patinkin had Mr. Roman represent it on the layout. "My uncle Harold, the last trip he made was to my son's bar mitzvah, three years ago," Mr. Patinkin said. "We carried him up the steps to see the layout. He parked himself in front of the Peoples Iron and Metal Company. "And he just sat there and wept." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/garden/11TRAI.html?ex=1019533789&ei=1&en=b31c56fe412bcd29
Guys, If any part of that story didn't bring a tear to your eye, you better go take up take up gardening!!! How can you express the love for our hobby any better, I challenge anyone to do it!!! 2slim "Model Railroader"
An excellent article and it rings very true. When I go down to my layout I am in my own world. all the stresses of work and pressuers of family life all disappear. I truelly believe that this hobby will extend my life due to the stress reduction and the fact it give me enjoyment and goals for my retirement. Modellers like Paul Templar and Watash are living proof how this hobby can provide challenges to keep mind and body occupied during what should be the most enjoyable time of your life - Retirement.
That was a great article Johnny ... but you should have warned me that I should have a lunch nearby Whew! Maybe I'm just a slow reader. LOL
Mandy's uncle weeping at the sight of his business, really tore me up........ I'm sorry that the photos used in the article didn't appear on the Times website..........
Bill, the next time I post an article like that lunch is on me! Sometimes I like to have "breakfast" for lunch. And that's no yolk.
Hank, I'm so glad to share this with everyone. We like to have fun here in TrainBoard but sometimes we post something that really touches the heart.
It touched a cord in my mind. I am realizing that I am in this hobby to regain some fun from my youth, and now I am really truly out of it! Our, or "your" hobby is no longer for "us kids of 7 and 10 years old", it has out grown us especially our spending money. Now it is an adult hobby/collector rich man's thing. No imagination is allowed, everything has to be way over-priced, computer controlled, proper number of rivets even if you can't see them, on and on, way beyond us kids who want to just run trains. I remember when My 2-4-0 engine could be a huge thundering mallet for several hours, struggling over the continental divide with the three cars I had making up a hundred car string reaching back far out of sight. Then mom would call me to supper. Dad would come down to our layout, and we would run the (same engine and freight cars) that would be the Empire State Express racing through a stormy night of rain to deliver our passengers and mail to New York City from Wichita by the Moffett Tunnel, and the little red caboose became out "Helper" mallet pushing from the rear! Daddy is gone now, and I may not even paint scenery on this last layout. I still have my imagination, and that saves me a great deal of money to live on my last few years here. Somehow, I am enjoying my trains more every day because good weather is coming and I'll be spending less time here day dreaming, and much more laying track and running trains! Yeah the article touched me. I'm really out of touch with the plastic hobby of today!
Johnny, great article! Was that in today's Times? That would figure because today was the first day in a long time that I forwent purchasing the Times because the copies that were in my local deli were all ripped up with road rash! I guess they through them out the truck door as they were still moving! BTW- Don't feel bad. I eat dinner for breakfast due to me working nights. There is only one place that I can get dinner at 0700 - home, along with my layout! Russ
Russ, that was in Thursday's Times. My neighbor may have it if you want me to see for you. There were other photos too. Watash, if I ever hit a big, big LOTTO I'm going to have that man build me a masterpiece! (Computer controls will be at a bare minimum. I'm just not as talented as that guy. I'd also like to say I had the money to PAY someone to build something great too!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Thanks for the kind offer Johnny. I did get to check it out when I went to the library yesterday and I must say that the article goes even better with the pics. Ahhhh, to go back in time to that first innocent layout of my own where anything went! Happy Railroading! Russ
I really enjoyed reading the article from the NY Times. Thank you for posting it and the link to the website. Bummer that there were not anymore pix. Oh well, I guess any mention of model rr in today's world is a great thing. I agree w/the author and people in the article about having control of one's own world in model rr. I model the present but keep a few big reminders of the past on my layout and in the fallen flag that I run. I model Cotton Belt because my grandfather worked on the line and also I run steam--Big Boy,Challenger,Allegheny,Pacific,2-8-0, 2-10-0. So I may have a SD90 or an SD60M here or there but the Cotton Belt lines and the steam provide a link to the past. BTW--not a rivet counter
Great article. No, make that awesome article! That's why I like this hobby- even though my favorite railroad doesn't exist anymore, I can still take my HO stuff to the club layout, and again imagine Frisco's train 33 tearing across the Ozarks from St. Louis to Tulsa, or a branch line local with two GP15-1s on the point hauling woodracks to the paper mill at Valliant, or even an Alco RS1 on the point of a local in noirtheastern Arkansas, or switching the feed mills at Springdale, AR. On my N scale line, I can see an active railroad where in real life only graded-out earthwork exists, rolling across the blackland prairies of Texas, once again part of the country's transporation system and not another ghost railroad. Back to the days as a small boy in Wyoming, watching the UP's Encampment Branch local switch out the sawmill in Saratoga and trundle back up the line to Walcott Jct., where it had to wait for long drag freights pulled by Big Blow gas turbines, the "City" passenger trains, and fast perishible trains speeding east. On my layout I revert from a 45-year old man with gray hair, high blood pressure and a gut to an excited 8-year-old with a burr haircut, squinting in the hot Wyoming sun watching the train roll by.
Frisco, I sure wish there was a model railroad club in reach of me. My tiny apartment layout is fun, but I'd love to be somewhere where I could join others in some realistic model railroading. Nothing is within a normal reach of me here in Manhattan. Well......you are in the shadow of the Grand Mesa while I used to be in the shadows of two tall buildings........... I go by there every day.......it's amazing to see a 16 acre pit. Glad to see our love of trains published in something as important as the Times!
