Subject says it all.
I’ll post my own thoughts a bit later on.
For me it is a pure escape into a fantasy world of my own creation where nothing bad ever happens.
I don’t model reailty, my models are definitely run through a rose coloured filter.
The real world stays out of my train room.
Escapism, that is what Model Railroading is for me.
-Kevin
For me personally, like Kevin it is pure escapism. No matter the layout I have had over the years, just to escape the trials and trinbulations of life for an hour or more.
Now with five grandchildren joining in, seeing the enjoyment in their faces; even when they run trains seriously. They know they do there own thing when away from the layout, but in the train room ‘it is another world’.
David
[^o)] Hmmmmmm??!![^o)]
I find it interesting that Kevin and David both use “escapism”.
Apart for not currently having the time to indulge in actual modelling, I’m in a pretty good space in the day job at present, and therefore don’t need to “escape”.
I am surprised at the amount of ffolkes who tell me, because of my day job, I really should be building model aircraft, why model railways?
It’s simple I tell them, it’s a great hobby to have, I’m learning and doing new things, and model railroading is a great place to come to, for some R & R.
It depends on who asks. If the wife asks, then the answer is. It keeps me out of the bar rooms. Just kidding.
For me it’s like reliving history in miniature. Watching a big decopods drag a long string of empty hoppers, I wonder about the iron men running it. Hand firing sixteen tons of coal in a twelve hour day. No one in there right mind would ever do that today.
Gaining knowledge and putting it to practical use is another big plus. I can actually say that I have tried new things and techniques for doing things.
Comradery in the club settings and the module group. Where people from all ages and walks of life can get together on a single subject. I can say that I have befriended people I never would have met without the hobby.
The diversity of the hobby itself. Scales, gauges, layouts, or just collecting. It’s your hobby and you make the rules. Unlike my other hobby of RC helicopters and drones that the FAA and other government agencies are trying to ruin beyond repair.
Pete.
P.S. It gives me something to do when I’m bored. ; )
For the most part of 70 years (7 to 77), I’ve played with trains - Lionel, HO, and a bit of N. To me, the hobby has been:
-
a pastime that kept me at home and out of trouble
-
a creative outlet
-
a recapture of a bit of my youth
-
and during the difficult times, it was my “pacifier”
In short, I enjoy it, it’s fun. Plus, I’ve learned so much from it. I’ve found it’s a hobby where because there’s so much one can do, it keeps me more engaged especially when I’ve taken on a substantial project such as building a shelf layout. Plus there is much joy for me in seeing a project unfold even after it being a many-month or many-year undertaking. It has always been a way to enjoy trains and get to see my favorite trains running and to enjoy in a miniature seeing trains that had been gone for decades run again, such as a New York Central Hudson pulling excursion trains as I’m working to recreate now.
Alvie
I don’t just focus on trains.
I build models of cars, trucks, ships, figures, planes, buildings, et-cetera.
For me, it’s a way to explore history…
And, stay out of my wife’s way …
It’s my time machine, with three stops, the Transition Era, the mid-1930s, and the present. The present is for DCC and LEDs and all the modern stuff that supports them.
Like Mobilman, I’ve been doing this for 70 years, 5 to 75. It’s a time machine in that respect, too. I can close the door, turn on the power, dim the room lights and be five years old again.
It means:
A return to the heady experiences of being near working steam locomotives. My three or four earliest memories include seeing them work the yard at the INCO smelter in Sudbury, ON, in 1955. I couldn’t tear my eyes away as we drove past.
Five years later, in Casapalca, Peru, at 10K feet, we had at least five Baldwin 2-8-0 standard gauge steamers go past us at a few feet below us, around a horseshoe, and come back past us the other way, but now 100’ above our back yard. This was in a narrow alpine valley maybe 500 yards across, with steep mountains on either side of the Rimac River. We had maybe five hours of direct sunlight in that deep valley.
For me, now, it’s nostalgia. It’s something to do, a goal, even a challenge, when I’m in construction and scenicking. A diversion. I have never looked at it as a refuge. I don’t need to absent myself from people generally, although I am an introverted personality, and can’t take a lot of hubub for long. I’m grateful when we see our last guests out the door when my wife and I host. Glad to see them, just as happy to close the door behind them.
I’d like to see your thoughts, Mark.
It would be a long essay if I started listing everything I like about the hobby. I was in logistics for 36 years, moving stuff for the Feds using all forms of transportation available. For this reason, I have no interest in switching or operating for pretend as a screw-up does not cost huge money or other serious issues so I find it offers no challenge. For me it is the modeling and creating something that looks as close to real as I can get it, I have a long way to go on that front.[(-D]
I am a very fit 65-year-old, I never nap, never get up at the night to pee, and can go all day. Last Christmas my wife bought me a Garmin 4 to monitor all my vitals. Looking back at my heart rate history since Christmas, what I found really interesting is my heart rate drops to about 40 BPM when I am doing two things, one is watching hockey and the other is when I am in the train room. It almost flatlines at 40.
All those times I came home from work after an exhausting 20-hour day, grabbed a glass of wine, and sat watching a train or two make those six-minute laps around the layout turned out to be pulling the plug on the adrenaline I still had pumping through me from my day. Anything that makes me relax as much as MRR seems to do must be good for my health.
I could write an essay, and I will. It will take a while. By the time I post it on here everyone else will have commented and moved on, so folks won’t have to scroll over my Moby Dick of a response on their way to more succinct answers.
-Matt
Selector, I just did a low altitude flyby over Casapalca on Google Earth. That’s an amazing (and remote!!!) place. I couldn’t see a horseshoe curve that looked like it might have had a residential neighborhood inside it, though. Must have been fun to live so close to such hard working rail lines!
-Matt
My railroading started just four years ago, about a year after I retired. I needed something to occupy my time.
I’m happy that I picked model railroading because it has given me a lot of pleasure in my leisure time.
I also found that something I didn’t think I would like – scratchbuilding – has become my favorite part of the hobby. I never would have guessed.
I spent my entire working career dealing with teenagers, teachers, and parents. Model railroading has allowed me not to have to deal with anyone but myself.
[:D]
I used to tell folks that my trains were the only thing that I could control with certainy. Not true (for me at least) now that DCC is here. I can do the basics of DCC, but boy can I get confounded and bamboozled in a hurry.
Okay, here they are.
My second earliest memory is of long strings of tank cars waiting to enter the Sinclair Refinery loading tracks in Casper Wyoming. (My oldest is of a silver and red toy airplane, but that’s neither here nor there).
When I was eight years old I got a Lionel train set for Christmas.
I played with that thing for years!
When I was in junior high I met a couple guys who modeled in HO. That got me hooked, and all through my high school years I built a succession of not-very-good and incomplete layouts. But I was modeling by then, not just playing with O27 trains (nothing wrong with that, though).
In college I put away the trains, but after I started work I was right back into them.
During my working life I moved around every few years (itchy feet - I always liked to move someplace I’d never been before). There were several years-long gaps in my model railroading “career,” but I built layouts almost everywhere I lived. Or maybe I should say I started layouts - every time I got the point of starting scenery I’d move again!
A few of the layouts…
California:
Kent, Washington (same track plan as the California layout):
And then with married life and a bit more stability, the first layout - the big one with the behemoth helix (over 8 scale miles of track) - in Merchantville NJ:
I read it. It makes sense. I hadn’t realized, or maybe my retired brain, also tired, just doesn’t recall that you lost your wife those years ago…already. I can tell from your words how much that devastated you. It would me, and would most of us reading. It seems you have a pretty solid partner helping you do stuff for the current build, and that’s good to see.
Nostalgia figures in so many responses here. We were all children at one, time, young, callow, innocent, where the toughest part of the day was to leave our buddies in the playground or out by the pond and return home when called to dinner. When a train of any description rumbled past, we did the funeral thing; turned, stood up straight, and paid our respects. [(-D]
I have mentioned it before, perhaps as recently as a few weeks ago; who doesn’t remember what grandma’s house smells like? Who doesn’t get that familiar and comfortable feeling about our youth when we play with toy trains?
BTW, about Casapalca. I’m very pleased you took the time to look, crossthedog. For the sake of simplicity, I related the story the way we do when our family gets together and we reminisce. We talk about the mine postings my dad had while we were in Peru, and Casapalca was our second. We went to Cerro de Pasco twice, to a place called Mahr Tunnel, and to La Oroya where there was, and still is, a sizeable smelter where the company’s ores were processed. But, the horseshoe curve is in our ‘bedroom community’ where the gringo higher-ups (my dad was the general manager of the mill) were housed. It might show up on google as Bella Vista. That’s what it was called in 1959. If google presents it to you, you’ll see the Rimac running down the middle of the valley, and immediately to one end of the arrayed houses, close-set, you’ll see a horseshoe curve of rail. Further away was our one-room schoolhouse, a large inventory of s
Hi Mark,
My basic reason for having trains is simply because I can finally have some trains of my own.
When I was a toddler my older brothers had a Marx O gauge train set. I was allowed to watch but I couldn’t touch. I think that set up some very deep frustrations which were amplified by the time that I got to the age where I might have been allowed to operate it but that wasn’t possible. The locomotive motor had burned out so the set was packed up and put in the attic.
I had pretty much forgotten about the train set until my mother pulled it out of the back of a closet and asked me if I wanted it. I didn’t say no! The rest is history. I found a couple of replacement locomotives at a train show in Bracebridge, Ontario. I set the track up on a few sheets of plywood in the garage and ran trains! I took me less than a day to figure out that tinplate trains didn’t work for me so I packed it all up again.
I casually mentioned to my wife that I would prefer the much more realistic HO trains, but I didn’t take it any further. That Christmas she bought me the Bachmann HO Hogwarts Express and I realized just how happy it made me. Like I said, the rest is history!
Cheers!!
Dave
I worked at a stressful job for many years. Model railroading provided badly needed release from the stress.
Friendships. My very oldest friend, someone I’ve known since I wandered away from home as a 4 year old and his mom marched me right back home - we were then in elementary school together – is someone I am still good friends with because of trains and model trains, which is still mostly what we talk about when we see each other or exchange emails and phone calls. Other friends from my childhood I have fallen out of touch with.
My very best friend is someone I know solely because of trains. He was repairing my folks’ garage, saw my workbench with model railroad stuff on it (which I had not cleared away when I went off to college in 1970), we got in contact and we’ve been friends ever since, soon it will be 50 years. There is simply no way I would have ever met this guy if he had not seen my HO trains in my folks’ basement.
Other good friends are from my local NMRA Division, guys whose layouts I have operated on, railfanned with, go to train shows with. Maybe not the closest and deepest friendships, but genuine friends. And no matter how long the gap is between seeing each other there is always and immediately something to talk about, even if they are Lionel guys or Z scale guys or live steam guys, whatever. Even some friendships as a result of postings on these Forums, including some private messages.
I have other interests such as music and baseball and have friends associated with those; ditto old colleagues from work or from school. When I played golf I had golfing friends. But trains and model trains account for many, and the closest, friendships.
Dave Nelson