Review: "Playing With Trains"

I recently finished reading Playing With Trains - A Passion Beyond Scale by Sam Posey. I received a paperback copy of the book as a Christmas gift this year, and as I had just finished reading Rumpole and The Penge Bungalow Murders, another similarly sized book seemed to fit well into my reading list. Overall, the book was a pleasant diversion through one man's experiences in learning about model railroading and building his own home layout, but I was left both wanting to read more about the layout and with a rather pessimistic view of the hobby's future.

Synopsis

In Playing With Trains, we are autobiographically taken through the life of a model railroader from his first Lionel set as a pre-teen through the discovery of scale modeling, finally settling on a specific prototype and era and constructing and operating a layout to fit it. At various points along the journey, there are detours to provide a little historical background on, for example, a brief history of Lionel train development and the construction of the Colorado Midland Railroad. The reader is also invited to tag along on the author's visits to the railroad empires of some of the hobby's more well-known participants like Tony Koester, George Sellios and Malcom Furlow. There's a small section of photos in the middle of the book that shows vignettes of the various "finished" layouts that are visited in the text.

Book contents

• Part One
  • The Mighty ZW
  • Lionel Dad
  • The Gorre and Daphetid
  • John James Hagerman
  • Thin Air
  • In The Zone
  • Short Notice
  • Engleman Canyon
• Part Two
  • Fountain of Youth
  • Ruling an Empire
  • The Holy Grail
  • A Railroad to Run
  • Borrowed Time
  • The Silver Meteor
  • Powered by Steam
• Epilogue

Although the author splits the contents into two parts, in reading it I thought it worked better in three parts: the author's youth, building the Colorado Midland layout and examining other modelers' approaches to the hobby. Each part is written with readers who are not necessarily modelers in mind.

The Good

The book overall is an easy read, even for people who aren't model railroaders. He doesn't go into too great detail on the more technical aspects of building a model railroad, but adds enough (and explains the more esoteric terms and concepts) that the reader is able to understand what he's working on and how he's doing it. The story itself flows logically from his first childhood Lionel layout through building (although not really planning) his version of the Colorado Midland in HO scale to what appears to be the present. The author presents a wide range of modeling styles through visits to other well-known modelers' layouts and refrains from stating that any one style is "best"; rather, they are described merely as different ways to participate in this wide-ranging hobby.

The Bad Not-Quite-As-Good

I wouldn't say that there was really anything bad about the book, but as a model railroader myself, I wanted to read more about the technicalities of the model railroad. In the book he wrote that the layout was featured as a cover story in a past issue of Model Railroader Magazine, but didn't explicitly say which issue it was; I had to run over to the Model Train Magazine Index to find out that it was the February 1995 issue. He also wrote about a followup article titled The Magic of Illusion, and it was back to the index to find it in the December 2001 issue. I also would have liked to see more photos throughout the book rather than a smattering of pages segregated to the middle of the text. I would especially have liked to see more photos of the layout as it was being built. The author tells us all about the photos that he took during his layout's construction, but there are only a select few in the image gallery. Toward the end of the narrative, the author describes the current state of the hobby. The mood turns a bit somber here as the author laments the fact that so many model railroaders are beyond middle-aged and will soon be leaving the hobby to hang out in the great crew lounge in the sky. He also takes some words to describe the attendees at a model railroad show, but rather than looking at the great number of people attending the show, we get a description of the sometimes over-obsessed railfan and modeler that we've all seen drooling over the layouts at a show. In the Epilogue and Acknowledgements at the end of the book, we discover that the editor thinks of the entire hobby as an obsession and its participants as people that do not quite fully fit in to normal society. All together, I was left with a sense of foreboding ill for the future of the hobby.

The verdict

The strong opening and layout construction sections seem to fall on their face a little as the author moves into describing where the hobby could be heading. I was left at the end with more of a sense that model railroading is a hobby that is losing practitioners faster than it is gaining them. Seeing the large number of excited children at some of the train shows that I attend, however, I'm not sure if that's really the most accurate assessment for the hobby. But, in the way it was presented in the book seems to be the opposite of the showmen's creed "always leave the audience wanting more."

So, to put a number on it based on a scale of 1 to 5 spikes where 5 spikes is best, I guess this would rate 3½ spikes. I enjoyed reading about the layout development and construction, and I wanted to go through my library of Model Railroader back issues to find and read the author's two articles, but the mood turned a little too somber for me at the end of the book. If you receive it as a gift, it's worth reading, but given my own experience reading it, I don't think that you need to buy it unless you really want to.