model trains
don't worry! I'm not an enthusiast, not an addict. just a more or less normal person who appreciates model railroads, and who can get lost for an hour or two admiring the detail someone else put into building the scenery for a good layout. oh my goodness! the hours a serious modeler puts into it, the detail! I read somewhere about a man who built a model B-25 three times to get the details right for its crash on a model railroad's layout. but model trains, model trains! once upon a time while we lived in Brasil, someone sent me an electric model train. I'm sure it was meant as a kindness, so it was probably my granddaddy. (our family didn't have many kind or generous people, or I didn't notice them.) it was a Lionel, and had six cars: the engine, the coal tender, the boxcar, the tank car, a car for carrying aggregates (like gravel, pebbles, dirt, or sand), and the caboose. oh man! naturally I could hardly wait to set it up. oops! problem. there was nowhere in the house big enough to set up the track - which could be set up in a circle, in a figure eight, an oval, or an oval with a round loop at one end - where it wasn't in the way. second problem. the Lionel track and engine were built for American electricity, not for Brasilian electricity. now before you get busy mocking me for thinking electricity has a nationality, please understand that I know it hasn't. However, different nations use different conventions for electrical power distribution. the UnitedStatesian standard is 120 volts AC at 60 Hertz, or cps. the Brasilian standard is or was nonexistent; however, where we were, the electrical standard was 220 volts at 60 Hz or 60 cps. whew! converting frequencies is harder than converting voltages. all we needed was a step-down transformer, and we had several of those. oops! except they were doing real work for grownups. oops! problem three. in northeastern Brasil in 1950, there was no Fry's, no equivalent. I had to go to a real store when it was really open (not Christmas day) and spend real money to get a stepdown transformer which could stand the varying load in current that running a train demanded. OMG! which led to problem four. I had no money, not even an allowance. that meant I had to explain to my father what was needed. do you remember that he and I did not share a language? yes, I had to give him technical specifications across a no-common-language barrier. and my father was a Very Busy Man who had time to generate kids but no time to raise them - my interpretation. it took three tries, three different trips to an electrical store that had to be worked into a Very Busy Schedule. but I give him his due, he did get me one, and one evening I got to set up the train and run it for the whole family. now there are a couple of limitations on an electric train for a tennish-year-old boy who has read Robin Hood and Rob Roy and the Lone Ranger and Odysseus for boys and Tarzan and King Arthur and even Richard III. it doesn't really do anything. it goes around the track then it goes around the track then it goes around the track again. hunh. Now you can tear the track apart and put it back together another way, and then your train goes around the track then it goes around the track then it goes around the track again. so you put it all away, and some time later, you pull it out and put it together a third way and the train goes around the track then it goes around the track then it goes around the track again. it kinda loses its charm. somehow that train set came to "the States" and rejoined us in Clovis and the older of my younger brothers adopted it and got a lot more out of it. years and years later, he built a really, really complex set of tracks in an oddly shaped bedroom that gave him plenty of challenge for building those tracks. it was complex enough that two or three trains could run on it at the same time, and the trains could pass by each other without hitting! he had painted the room with vistas from our southwest, so the trains ran through the desert and grasslands and foothills and mountains. the trains stopped out in the middle of nowhere, or they stopped in a village or a town or a city. he must have spent years building all that, and somehow it entertained him. and I think it amused him that people like me came in and saw the layout and got all worked up about the details, and saw the train go around, then go around, then go around again without ever seeing the nuances of the stops and the changing loads and whatever else he saw. so, yes, I appreciate model trains, but somewhere out there in the world I don't know, I have a younger brother who really appreciates them like they ought to be appreciated.
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