I am trying to write this without going to a toy store, relying solely on finger memory. In any event, the store would probably not let me handle the trains. They were never cheap, but they are now—sixty years later— luxury goods, kept out of reach.
I had a small train set when I was a child, a rail circle two feet across with a single locomotive, a couple of goods wagons and one passenger car. I would set it in the middle of the living room, with two wires going to a small yellow and red plastic transformer with a red knob. Even that simple setup was tricky to put together. The rails would have been deformed by having been stepped on and would not join up. Getting the cars on the rails properly was fiddly. When powered up, the thing would often buzz angrily without moving.
The locomotive was small and chunky, a black and red steam engine with six wheels and only one horizontal linkage connecting three red wheels on the side. That one was easy to put on the rails. I just had to feel both rail and wheels and make sure nothing stuck out. The goods wagons were easy too, with just four wheels each. The longer passenger car, however, had its eight wheels divided, attached to two pivoting bogies to take the curves, and those had to line up carefully. If either derailed, the steel wheels would make a grating noise against the fake ballast. When I got it on just right, the smoothness of the movement, like a ball race, was satisfying. I could then roll it down the track to bump against the others where it would latch on.
Once everything was working, I would dim the lights, turn the knob and watch the thing go round and round. Yes, the small circular track was confining, and I had vague thoughts of a much larger set going under the couch and coming out the other side, maybe big enough to course along the walls of the living room. But the essence of trainhood was already fully there. The length of track did not matter. What mattered was the attitude of the locomotive, a doughty little thing pulling a load regardless of circumstance, asking no questions about meaning and purpose, a little emblem of willing, head-down energy, whirring at my command.
Of course I was aware of the vastness of model trainhood I did not possess: large locomotives, michelines (essentially snake-nosed buses on train tracks) without a separate engine; entire Trains Bleus made up of sleeper cars with grand gold lettering of the Wagons-Lits company; faceted, chunky electric traction engines of the French Railways, clearly designed by an engineer with artistic leanings. There was also much potential in fancy X-shaped rail switches, sidings, lights to sit alongside the rails, small countryside stations consisting only of an awning and a short platform. Many of these were pure pipe dreams, seen in a catalog. My father enjoyed that he could always buy me an incremental piece when needed, so my collection gradually grew without ever becoming grand.
He bought these at a huge toy store on the main town drag, rue du Rhône in Geneva, where of course they had an entire alpine valley in the window display, with half a dozen trains running concurrently, stopping at signals, starting when appropriate and disappearing in short papier-maché tunnels. The way they started and stopped too suddenly, getting up to full speed in a fraction of a second, had the comical effect of a time-lapse. Real trains were ponderous and slow, and these model trains had surrendered that dignity. Also the landscape was ridiculous: firehouse, hotel, factory and a masonry bridge by a rail yard, all crowded together as in a full-page children’s book illustration.
The toy store was keen to impress and even carried train gauges other than the HO that I and everyone else used. These had curious properties of scale. The tiny one, N-gauge, had unquestionably cute rails, but the rolling stock, half the size of mine, was just too small, the details either insufficiently visible or butting up against facts of life like the minimum radius of the casts used to make them. For a miniature to be convincing, the detail has to defy physics and look like magic. Strangely, the larger O gauge, which should have been better, was also wrong, made with small-scale features either omitted or big enough to see they were a little crude. No, HO gauge was the perfect size, all detail present and correct.
The relationship between a model’s size and its magic is complex. One of the effects of scale models is to make you, or more accurately the space around you, feel big. I remember a magic moment during a dance performance by Carolyn Carlson when the stage emptied, and a gradient of pink, yellow and blue light like the dawn flooded the back wall. One of the dancers sauntered in, deposited a toy locomotive the size of a loaf of bread at the back of the stage and ran off. It began moving towards us, headlamp shining, making whoo-hoo calls. The stage was suddenly, and unforgettably, a vast plain at sunrise, and we in the stalls were all as gods flying. The size of model that would make this work is surprisingly narrow. N-gauge would look like some insect, O-gauge like a child’s sit-on toy.
Aside from the filth and grime of real trains, which HO-gauge model railways did not attempt to replicate (what a project that would be!), the quality of their reproduction was stellar. Locomotives and carriages are intricate in volumes and inscriptions, and these had been lovingly replicated in the models you could buy, packaged in boxes with cellophane windows to let you inspect the goods. I imagined they were made by pale, unhappy, balding men with an unrequited love for railways. I was grateful for their existence but would have found them frightening in real life, as I did the grown-up customers in the store. The shop had shelves behind glass with exemplars of higher-grade machinery with forbidding price labels. As a child, I felt that these had left the realm of the imagination and gone over the hill to the adult world of collecting, a quest with no end.
I was satisfied with the modest size of my train set which, it seemed to me, adequately conveyed the essence of trains while domesticating them. Real trains were large, forbidding, scary. Going from one carriage to another at speed, stepping over the sliding metal plates connecting them, in a bellows tunnel that lets you see the coursing ballast below, was terrifying. The knowledge of the heaviness of trains had a crushing force all its own. Standing on the platform watching the carriage go slowly past made my toes hurt at the thought of them being flattened between wheel and rail. A train journey was a succession of anxieties. Model trains helped exorcise this. They were cats and real trains were tigers.
There remained an unexplored region full of mystery and magic: what might happen beyond O-gauge? In the UK, we’ve all seen pictures in brochures of tourist attractions of guys with big bums, in uniform, wearing scarf and official cap, sitting astride a small steam engine on a track in a lovely English garden, looking silly. Most of the joy at that scale comes from the fact that real steam powers the machine, but it still seems cruel to sit atop it as on a dwarf pony. At what size does a train stop wearing you and you start wearing it? There exists, of course, the much loved narrow-gauge railway, but that’s just a normal train underfed in its formative years. Somewhere between Live Steam and narrow-gauge is a land where the childhood magic comes back to life.
I do not remember which Famous Five type novel included this picture, but it left a mark: small rail tracks disappearing out of view in a Mediterranean pine forest. The French call this type of railroad a Decauville. I encountered one long out of service in a disused gold mine in the Alps that I visited with my uncle. The image conjures up many disparate sources of joy. First is the understanding, familiar from fairground rides, that boarding it means you agree to go wherever it takes you. Next, there is the illicit thrill of being on a transport intended for goods—which ones?—taken to and from—maybe?— a mine. Then there is the extra magic of the disused, things that now serve no purpose and go nowhere. These small rails combine the inevitable (where they go is foreordained) and the deliberate (you could jump off but don’t). They are a placeholder for destiny.
Model trains were one way my dad tried bonding with me and my two brothers, and they were also a way for him to isolate himself from us. My grandmother would routinely trash my father's possessions when he was young, stuff like baseball cards and comic books, so I suppose the psychological profile writes itself. He'd gift trains, collect them, even build them with X-Acto and balsa alone in the kitchen; he'd subscribe to relevant magazines he'd read in his bathroom; he'd take us to conventions and hobby stores I found confusing and dull. While we all liked trains, only one of us caught the bug. (That brother is a pilot for famous people now and once bonded with Rod Stewart on the subject.)
Lego was MY toy: modern, plastic, primary-colored. It has such a privileged position in my brain I've been dreaming about finding discontinued sets in stores since the 1980s. (I always wake up before I can get to the cash register.) Still, the little dramas of childhood mastery over the world that Lego enables has to be much like those my dad enacted with trains. It may even be an inheritance.
"They were never cheap, but they are now—sixty years later—luxury goods, kept out of reach": Looking at the prices on the Lionel website...good God. Even fragrance is more budget-friendly. Glad I stuck with Lego. "The length of track did not matter": I never had that level of equanimity as a child. With so many toys, Lego included, I was always acutely aware that whatever I had, it could always be bigger and gnarlier and just plain MORE were it not for the upper limit of what my parents would tolerate buying. Of course by the time I could spend my own money on expensive hobbies, those totalist fantasies had long ceased to be interesting.
Thanks for the lovely remembrance. I am old enough to remember the toy trains and the magic they carried for us when we were children.