Little trains, big fun

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• News Features staff writer
• Published: Mar 14, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Model trains are for kids. Age doesn’t seem to matter.

When the Greater Baton Rouge Model Railroaders gather every other week, the doors open to retirees and their grandchildren. The area behind the Republic of West Florida Historical Museum in Jackson, La.,  becomes a wonderland of the sights and sounds of modeling. Since the meetings on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month are open to the public, they often draw a crowd.

“It’s just like having a train show every weekend that we’re there because the public comes, and little kids’ eyes get big,” said long-time member Bob Coon. “We basically convene and play with trains.”

All sorts of trains, too. The club, Coon notes, has on display almost every available gauge: N (which is 1/160th the size of the trains represented), HO (1:78), S (1:64), O (1:48) and G (1:22.5). The club also has an outdoor track devoted exclusively to steam-powered trains.

The trains themselves are interesting, but as anyone who has ever played with models, it’s the layout that really provides the variety. The GBRMR layouts are nothing if not varied.

The garden layout is the first one visitors see, and it features the largest (G Gauge) trains. The recently expanded track is 85 feet long and 20 feet wide. The four tracks, bridges and buildings are weatherproof and stay outside, and the landscaping is tended by Andy Martin, who became interested in model trains after he bought a house nearby at The Bluffs.

“A good-sized weed could derail one of these trains, so you have to keep after the weeds all the time,” Martin said.

That is no problem indoors, where visitors are greeted first by an enormous N Gauge layout the club has been accumulating for years. Most of the components are owned by club members and feature numerous buildings, vehicles and individuals, all set to the same scale, some of them that also move — including a fisherman in a lake who, with a push of a button, sees his rod tip bend, then lifts a fish out of the water. Above the layout, model airplanes and hot-air balloons rotate or move up and down.

In addition to other scale models in side rooms, the building also features a Lionel layout, distinguished by its three-rail tracks and wide variety of O Gauge trains. The layout is designed to represent those used in department stores in the 1940s and 1950s, said Clay Fourrier, the club’s president.

“I remember when I was a kid going to the department store downtown on Third Street back then,” Fourrier said. “They had these types of layouts. It was all to sell the trains at Christmas time. When you see parents and their kids come in the door, you can almost see them beelining for this with their eyes big and wide. It involves a lot of noise, a lot of lights, things that would work with getting children into it.”

On second Saturdays of each month, the outdoor layout built for steam trains is in operation. These trains have much in common with the real thing.

“It gives you an appreciation of what the old engineers and firemen had to do,” said steam train enthusiast Ted Powell. “You’re constantly adjusting the throttles out there. … They work on all the same principles, and when they’re running, they’re beautiful to watch, especially on a good, cold day.”

Using propane or butane as fuel, they heat water to provide the power to propel trains around 50-foot by 20-foot tracks that are laid out on a level platform built 42 inches off the ground to make it easier to operate.