Southwest Snohomish County
Still in training, 29 years later

By Lynn Thompson
Times Snohomish County bureau

	HARLEY SOLTES / THE SEATTLE TIMES John Witt works on the Swamp Creek and Western Railroad Association's model-train setup at the Edmonds Amtrak station.
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EDMONDS — The grown men, playing with model trains, know they're the object of fun in some circles.

The recent film "A Mighty Wind" features a model-railroad enthusiast who is also a catheter salesman. He spends the movie in an engineer's hat, perched behind the elaborate but fake miniature world of his train.

"There's a caricature," acknowledged Bill Mackay, 65, the secretary of the Swamp Creek and Western Railroad Association, a group of about 20 model-train enthusiasts that meets weekly in the former baggage room of the Edmonds Amtrak station.

Come Christmas, though, the hobbyists find they have a lot of company.

"My wife says it isn't Christmas without a train running around under the tree," said Bruce Harris, a retired Edmonds School District teacher who is the group's president.

More information Swamp Creek and Western Railroad Association meetings are open to the public at 7 p.m. on the third Tuesday of each month. Meetings are at the Edmonds Amtrak station, 210 Railroad Ave. Membership dues are $20 a month. Information: Bruce Harris, 425-483-3322.

The Swamp Creek railroaders suspect the association between Christmas and trains dates to the Depression and World War II, when troops and families traveled home by rail, and when a model-railroad set was atop many kids' Christmas wish lists.

"A lot of people got their first train set for Christmas," said Mackay, a retired Navy pilot and Boeing manager. "Christmas morning, the new train was running around the tree."

The other hobbyists chimed in.

"My main interest was having train wrecks," said John Witt, 62, a mechanical engineer and writer.

"I used to run figure eights so the cars would crash," said Harris, recalling his boyhood model train.

In Amtrak's old baggage room, the eight club members attending last week's work session divvied up jobs on the highly detailed layout that nearly fills the 28- by 30-foot room. The layout, built in HO scale, one-87th of life-size (with a 6-inch-long engine, for example), replicates a fictional railroad from the early 1950s and represents work dating to the club's 1974 founding.

The club's railroad begins in an Eastern Washington orchard town and climbs the Cascades, where sidings run to mining and logging operations, crests the mountains, then travels through small towns and industrial railyards until it reaches a busy port at the mouth of the Columbia River.

One member last week soldered new connections on the miles of bundled wire tucked out of sight beneath the elaborate railroad layout. Another studied the mock-up of a city still under construction.

Everywhere are the tiny, authentic details that are part of the hobby's appeal. Die-cast police cars are parked outside a wooden-frame diner in the fictional town of Mount Brynion. At a rural outpost, two tiny women wait on a station platform. Behind the station, the door of a tiny wooden outhouse sports a traditional half-moon cutout no bigger than a baby's fingernail.

"It's kind of fun," said Witt, who's something of a poet of the hobby. "It makes you sharpen your eye and compress the real world. It's like a novel. The model has to be plausible."

The mood of the Tuesday-night meeting was energetic and resolved. The group is gearing up for the National Model Railroad Association's annual convention, which will be held in Seattle in July. The club's layout is one of about 75 in the Puget Sound area selected as a tour site for conference attendees.

"We want everything perfect for July," Mackay said.

That has meant tearing out whole sections of the layout that no longer looked convincing. Tree parties were held during several recent work sessions to replace dusty, 15-year-old trees. The new ones, studding dramatic mountain passes and classic tunnels, are constructed of sticks and steel wool, spray-painted and flocked with crumbled foam.

The layout also features plenty of inside jokes. The fictional town of Gilman is named for a former Edmonds station agent, Bud Gilman. By tradition, Mackay said, the model trains don't stop at Gilman, so Bud doesn't have to work.

Club members alternate work sessions with operations sessions, open to the public every third Tuesday of the month, when members are challenged to load coal or lumber in cars, clear lines for passing trains or maneuver to pick up additional cars or engines.

"We're really trying to run a railroad," Mackay said, "not play with trains."

As with many hobbies, the serious model-train enthusiast can shell out a lot of cash. One member recently paid $17,000 for a brass train set with 17 cars and four locomotives. The detail on such sets, Mackay said, is "amazing," with a brass steam engine having as many as 300 parts.

At Christmastime, the area's hobby shops fill with shoppers nostalgic for trains, said Jim Williams, the manager of Tim's Hobby Shop on Broadway in North Everett. Williams said the store currently has an HO-scale model for $109 that comes with an engine, six cars, snap track and a power pack.

At Everett Hobby Craft, a classic Lionel train, a larger model (with a 15-inch-long engine) than the HO train, starts at $150 for an engine with a headlight and a smokestack that "smokes," freight cars and track, said Michelle Parker, who owns the store with her husband, Lanny. But Parker said there aren't many such sets left.

"It goes back to a nostalgia for childhood," she said. "People want a train under the tree."

Lynn Thompson: 425-745-7807 or lthompson@seattletimes.com

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