A WSJ piece tonight about the inordinate number of unused freight cars currently parked on U.S. rail sidings tonight got me thinking about trains. My kids like to go to the San Diego Train Museum, which is, I’m told, one of the largest model train museums in the world. It is full of working scale replicas at various sizes, plus some three-railers that blow steam. The museum has some wonderfully detailed landscapes through which long model freight trains transit, including Carrizo Gorge, the Tehachapi Pass, and others.
I’ve learned at least three things there. First, trains are easier to wonder at when they’re smaller. Real trains are big and mostly elsewhere, so you can’t straightforwardly watch the sinuous play of the train’s cars as they wind through a pass like Tehachapi, with, at some points, the head of the train and the tail of the train passing by one another in opposite directions.
Second, the trick with model trains isn’t going fast, but going slow. A quality model freight train is, among other things, one that can pull many cars at a sustained slow speed over a varying landscape. Any wahoo can go bolting around a track, but real model train sorts pride themselves on trains that traverse these landscapes at a steady speed, whether climbing, descending, or on the flats. At first it all can seem a little glacial, but once you slow down and watch it has its own go-slow grandeur.
Third, model trains are quiet. Real trains are damn loud, so spending any time hanging around watching them would quickly become impractical for anyone worried about long-term hearing loss. (The WSJ piece at the top of this piece cites some people complaining about parked train cars shading their yards that are ten feet (!) from the rail lines. A passing freight train can be 80-100 decibels, so, given the choice, a parked car providing shade should be preferable to a passing one whose drilling noise exfoliates your lower back hair or something.)
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