Trains lend a sense of purpose and direction to life. You board, settle in, and pass the time as you ride towards your destination. While there are no guarantees your trip will be entirely pleasant, or that you will arrive on time, odds are you will exit the train at your chosen station.
Life is not like this.
John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Accepting this notion may be the key to a life well-lived. I started my own railroad journey inheriting 45 moving boxes filled with my father’s model train collection under the stipulation that I could not sell them as a lot to a collector to ensure the best return on sales. At least that’s what Dad said. I wonder if he could have known how the experience would change my life.
Before I boarded, I thought model railroading was a “geek” activity for introverts. I was wrong. For those who don’t understand the appeal, model railroading is very Zen. Tinkering with a locomotive, repairing a caboose, or planning a layout slows down and focuses the mind, tuning out past and future. A malfunctioning motor, a broken coupler, hands covered in wet plaster, forming landscapes to be painted and dotted with tiny plastic trees—we are alive in the present moment. Hours pass, our breathing calm and steady.
Unlike a jigsaw puzzle or a bathroom renovation, model railroading is a perpetual activity; one is never “done.” No destination, no “end of the line” appears as there is always something to be changed, expanded, repaired, upgraded or added, until the Engineer retires.
My father’s death threw a switch on life’s track, bending the rail that sent me in a direction I hadn’t planned. For the first time in my life I found stillness, focus, peace of mind. I could think one thought at a time from beginning to end. How did I get here? What do I need? Who am I? These questions floated in the background as I learned the entirety of the hobby I’d rejected my entire childhood.
In many ways my own life journey had no destination, no direction. Like a locomotive needing overhaul, I spun on the turntable until it stopped, chugging headfirst into the roundhouse of my basement for repairs. I closed over 1500 eBay auctions, carefully packing, boxing and shipping to destinations far and wide to become part of other modelers’ meditations. As the collection reduced in size and life transformed, I consigned the remainders to Cabin Fever Auctions in Pennsylvania; they did a great job. I highly recommend them as a resource for those who are less inclined to “sell Dad’s trains” themselves. Find them at https://www.cabinfeverauctions.com.
Emerging from my basement roundhouse, something felt different.
So much has changed along the way. A new career, the ending of a long term relationship, selling my home and moving. I have learned so much about model railroading, about life, and about impermanence. “Nothing gold can stay,” wrote Robert Frost; he’s right, although his line is incomplete. The gold in life can always be found in the present moment—right here; right now. Quantum physics has proven that life itself is a series of probabilities, of patterns and relationships; not certainties. We cannot be sure of anything because nothing in life, in the universe itself, is predictable. Except love, the infinite.
Quantum entanglement grounds love in science by observing that the relationship between objects is maintained across time and distance. So love transcends perceived reality, unbound by time and space. As Carl Jung said, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
I feel with some level of certainty that my father’s “gift” of model trains was an act of love, one that has transformed me. Perhaps he knew something about me that I didn’t know myself, but that’s how I see it. And it is in the spirit of love that I sent parts of his collection—parts of him—to new owners. It is in trains I’ve kept for myself—trains he made by hand, his initials carved in the undercarriage. It is in the little girl inside me who held his hand on walks around the block, and in the woman I have become, centered in her own life, excited about possibilities, probabilities, and even, uncertainties. I am profoundly grateful for the experience.
Model railroading. Who knew?
Selling Dad's Trains 