Round And Round

The locomotive eases forward, pulling the string of cars smoothly behind it. As it picks up speed, the rhythmic snorts of its pulsing power increase in tempo, and puffs of smoke swirl up from its stack. Swinging into a curve, the train's wheels set up a regular clickety-clack passing over the joints in the rails. Then into the straightaway, round another curve—round and round it goes.

This is your first train, so in all probability it cannot go anywhere but round and round the oval or circle of track that came with it. At the outset this is hardly a serious limitation, because you can get so much pleasure just from starting, running, backing, and stopping a miniature electric train.

The train itself, if it is a good one adhering with some fidelity to the proportions and details of real trains, is a joy to look at. Squint your eyes nearly closed until almost everything but the train is cut from view and an illusion of distance is created—then your train will come alive. Get down to the train's own level on floor or table and look at the sleek, compact package of energy that is your diesel or the black hulk of power of your steam locomotive. Look at your long, low coaches or Pullmans, their interior lights casting shadows of the passengers against the windows; or at your freight cars—hoppers, flatcars, boxcars, tank cars, gondolas, and caboose—accurate not only as to shape but as to color and the heralds of different railroads painted on the sides.

Then reach for the throttle—the control lever on your transformer—and move it slightly. See the big drivers of the locomotive turn slowly, urging the train into motion.

Increase the speed and watch your train set out for parts unknown. If you keep your eyes half closed and give your imagination free rein, you will see not just an oval of track on a floor but a highway of shining rails carrying people and goods from town to town, winding through farmland, around rolling hills, and across grassy plains. Down there where your train curves there must be a mountain, a wide river, or a deep ravine to be skirted. Set up a book or a box at the far end of the oval and imagine that your train disappears behind a cut in the hills or into a mountain tunnel. Then convince yourself that the train coming toward you a moment later is not the same train at all, but a different train on another track entirely. Bring it slowly to a stop at an imaginary station on the edge of a village, where it discharges passengers or unloads some freight.

One wonderful thing about model railroading is that you can make all these vivid imaginings and fine dreams come true. You can create a complete railroad system with stations, freight yards, sidings, signals, with several lines that cross, meet, diverge, and join to serve cities, villages, mines, industries, oil fields, logging camps, farms, cattle ranches. You will be president, chairman of the board, engineer, conductor, dispatcher, signalman, track crew, maintenance gang, construction engineer, foreman, and common laborer. You will not only build and run your railroad empire but also the world in which it operates, with its mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers, highways, houses, barns, and factories. Where else can you have a chance to make, according to your own ideas, a section of the earth and then manage its affairs as they center around its most important means of communication?

Don't let the task appear too big for you. Don't be discouraged by the vast difference between your simple oval of track on the floor and the landscaped train layouts that you may have seen in stores, clubs, magazine pictures, or the homes of old-timers at model railroading. The joy of this hobby comes from building your system rather than having it completed and running. As a matter of fact, few model pikes, as hobbyists call their layouts, are ever completed. People have too much fun making them to let them get finished. Before an original plan nears completion, its creator has dreamed up an extension or alteration that involves tearing up miles of track, demolishing a village, or leveling a mountain. Real railroads are constantly making changes and improvements, too. You don't have to stick with the world you create, but can change it any time you want.
              
You can make it as small or as large as you want. You can make it simple or complicated, full of scenery or bare. You can start with as modest a plan as you wish and make it more complex as you gain enthusiasm and experience. In other words, what you do with your model trains is entirely up to you. There are no rules to live up to, no "accepted" way of doing things. There are only the many different experiences of other model railroaders, which you can follow or not. There are usually several ways of doing any one thing connected with a model pike, and you can take your pick or make up a new way. There are even half a dozen ways of making a mountain, for instance.

You may say, "Oh, I'll never try to make a mountain because I'm not artistic." You're wrong, but nobody needs to convince you of that now. Don't make any mountains if you don't feel like it; there are hundreds of fascinating model railroads without a single mountain. Later, you may find out that you can make a good mountain—any-body can do it, really—and transfer your pike to the Rockies from flat Kansas.

Perhaps you hesitate to make a model railroad because you believe that you're not handy with tools or don't understand electricity. Well, you don't need any such skill to start out; you don't need a single tool to hook up and run your first train. So don't let that worry you. In time, when you are really interested enough to want to make something for your railroad, you will find that you can handle a screwdriver all right, that you can do a great many things you never suspected.

That's another good thing about this hobby—it develops talents and skills that have lain dormant because there was insufficient call to develop them. Many people fail to learn about handling simple tools because in the ordinary home they don't find repairing and mending interestingenough. Fixing a light switch is far from fascinating, so a man who thinks he doesn't understand electricity asks the  superintendent to do it or phones the nearest electrician. Let that same man become absorbed in electric trains and he will soon tackle more complicated wiring than his electrician would think of. Men who did not know one end of a hammer from another have built beautiful tables for their trains. Boys who were the despair of their art teachers in school have sculptured and painted realistic mountains, created trees out of moss and a bit of dye, painted scenic backdrops. Women who never knew what dingus on a camera to push have become expert photographers just so they could take pictures of the one landscaped corner of the family model pike.

The secret of all this talent and activity is fun. Pleasure is just about the strongest stimulant known, and model railroading gives a tremendous amount of pleasure to lots of people. Estimates of the number of ardent and active model railroaders in the country range from half a million up. Certainly it is the Number One hobby, having outdistanced stamp collecting some years ago, and it is growing at an amazing rate. One reason is that it can give great pleasure from the very beginning. You can't do much with your first twenty or thirty stamps in a collection, no matter how fascinating the hobby becomes when you have gathered together a good number. Three or four plants cannot occupy much of your time, even though gardening is a healthy and enjoyable pastime when your plantings grow to some size. Photography hobbyists don't really begin to enjoy themselves until they have a good camera, a darkroom, and a moderate amount of equipment.

The purpose here is not to disparage any other hobby but merely to point out that from the very moment you get your first electric train you can have a great deal of fun. That fun can continue for a lifetime as you develop your railroad, change it around, move it to another location. Give it as much or as little time as you want, add to it quickly or slowly, it will give pleasure at every stage of development, for the trains will run and you will watch them, control them, and let them carry you away from the ordinary workaday world.

Start out right now with your first tram set, which is probably similar to that seen in Plate A, opposite. It has a locomotive and tender with two to four cars of almost any kind you want. It has enough curved track to make a circle, and perhaps two, four, or six lengths of straight track to turn your circle into an oval. The track sections fit together easily, the pin of one rail fitting into the hole in the rail of the next section. If you are going to run your trains without fastening the track down, it is a good idea to hold the sections together with track clips, which probably come with your set. (See Fig. 1.)

Next you hook up the transformer, which either comes as a part of your train set or is bought separately. You have already learned what kind of electric current you have; your electric company can give you the information if you don't happen to know. Most houses and apartments are supplied with 110-volt, 60-cycle alternating current, on which standard electric train transformers can operate.

If your current is direct or of different voltage, the store from which you buy your train or the manufacturer can give you information about proper equipment. The chances are, however, that you will have no problem since most transformers are constructed to fit the current supplied in the great majority of homes in America.

You don't need to understand electricity to hook up your transformer. Just follow the simple and clear directions supplied by the manufacturer. In most instances there will be a track terminal, a clip which snaps to your track, and two wires leading from it to two posts on your transformer. You loop the wires around the posts and screw the nuts up tight. Then you plug the transformer into the light socket, set your train on the track—making sure all wheels fit properly—and open the throttle slowly.

Your train moves. Push the throttle farther and the train picks up speed; move it back and it slows down; all theway back and it stops.

You want to back up your train? There are different ways of doing it, depending upon the transformer you have. With some you press a button before moving your control lever again, with others you lift the lever twice. In any event, reversing your tram's direction is simple; directions accompanying your set or transformer tell you how to do it. So you back up your train, perhaps uncouple the last car—many train sets contain uncouplers—then send your train forward again.

And that's all there is to setting up and running your train at the beginning—no tools, no special knowledge or skill. If you can read simple directions you can have a train rumbling around your floor in less than five minutes. The next day, of course, your train and its track will be in the way. If this happens to be the day after Christmas or a birthday, it may be allowed to remain. But the time will quickly come when it will either be stepped on or removed by the person trying to clean the floor against great odds. The transformer will be unplugged, disconnected from the track; the track sections will be taken apart, the cars uncoupled, and everything will go into a box or closet.

The next time you want to operate your train you will not mind taking it from the box and assembling it. After all, it does take only five minutes or less. But if you are like most people, you will soon grow tired of getting it out and setting it up each time you want to be a locomotive engineer, taking it apart and putting it away each time you have finished. Even if you are lucky enough to have no track stepped on, you will find in time that the track pins are either bent or loose. A pair of pliers will fixthese defects in a jiffy, of course, but you will not like itwhen a pin drops out and is lost. Don't blame the manufacturer; he makes trains just as strong as they can bemade, but nothing can take constant assembling and disassembling without showing wear and tear.

Still, you can derive a great deal of pleasure from your train even under these circumstances. When you begin to accumulate a few accessories, however, you are almost certain to start planning a permanent setup. When you have bought a few additional sections of track to make a layout that is not a circle or oval, you will find assembly takes a bit longer. Hooking up accessories, especially switches, will extend your assembly time to half an hour or more, leaving you little time to operate your trains. And almost everyone wants switches as soon as he can manage them, for there is nothing much more fun than backing your train onto a siding, detaching one car by means of your remote-control electric uncoupler, and sending your train back to continue its regular run.

No matter how much pleasure you get from trains on the floor, you can get much more from trains that have a permanent home. Not long after getting your train you will begin thinking of a way to lay out a permanent track with all your accessories. You will probably include in your thinking some more switches and accessories that you've had in mind for the future. Planning ahead is much of the fun of model railroading, and finding space for a permanent layout is usually one of the biggest hurdles in that planning. "Today's small rooms in apartments and houses rarely offer immediate solutions to the problem. Nothing is impossible, however, to the model railroader, especially if his plans for the future are laid with care.

There is one step that comes before a permanent layout, and that carries us back before you have bought your first train. The first train you buy is the nucleus of your rail-road empire, the core of your entire system. Since everything you do in the future will be based on your first train, it is a good idea to choose it after thoughtful deliberation.

It is the train you will grow with, spend many happy hours with. Make sure it is the right one.

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