Chris, I can understand the origins of our deap seated feelings for siting around a fire and the pleasure of eating meat cooked over an open fire, these have been bred into the human race over many thousands of years. Trains...?? Trains haven't been around long enough to have been implanted in out psyche through Darwinian processes so the only reasonable explanation for their magical attraction (especially steam trains) is... well... MAGIC.
It defies logic and common sense and likely isn't trully a religious issue so what is left? MAGIC!
I used to sit on the floor of my attic bedroom, under the old table where my Lionel electric train was set up to listen to it run the rails and go clickity clack because it sounded more real.
The last train layout I saw (not counting the Peter Ustinov and Shirley McClain(SP?) comedy about Wrong Way Goldfarb, a funny rerun from the 60's) was in the atic of our Coast Guard Aux Flotilla Chaplain. He had a nice home overlooking the Pacific with a trully spectacular view from his expansive windows but liked to take visitors up a vertical ladder into the no-standing-headroom attic where he had a really large and elaborate train layout.
Mountains, deserts, villages, factories, ranches, farms...in good detail and scale down to the silk scarf around the neck of the driver of an open touring car waiting to cross the rails when the gate went up. He had the milk can loading accessory, the mail bag and mail hook that transferred mail to the train while on the move, stock yard accessory with little moving cattle that went to a cattle car, and on and on and on. It was the best private diorama and train layout I ever had seen before or since. If you took a catalog of available accessories for Lionel and Marx trains, I think there was probably one of everything up there plus stuff I had never seen in caalogs. He had built a roundhouse, drawbridge, had a lumber mill with a crane to handle logs. About the only thing I didn't see represented was kids throwing rocks, picked up from the right of way, at the passing box cars. (It gave a great illusion of the path of the rock curving laterally) It was a few years back but it makes me feel good just to remember it. (The train layout not throwing rocks)
And in closing (yes, it is nearly over..) this poem from my earlier slightly more poetic period.
Clickety clack, clickety clack,
Hear the train go down the track,
As it passes we all know,
It has no duty but to go,
On its way from town to town,
Making that goshawful sound!
Clickety clack, clickety clack
Clickety clack.
OK, OK, it isn't a sonnet and it isn't in Iambic pentameter...I was young.
Patrick
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