Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale
Filed Under (Model Train Scale) by admin on 01-08-2010
Tagged Under : Beyond, Passion, Playing, scale, Trains
Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale
Why do grown men play with trains? Is it a primal attachment to childhood, nostalgia for the lost age of rail travel, or the stuff of flat-out obsession? In this delightful and unprecedented book, Grand Prix legend Sam Posey tracks those who share his “passion beyond scale” and discovers a wonderfully strange and vital culture.
Posey’s first layout, wired by his mother in the years just after the Second World War, was, as he writes in his Introduction, “a miniature universe which I could operate on my own. Speed and control: I was fascinated by both, as well as by the way they were inextricably bound together.” Eventually, when Posey’s son was born, he was convinced that building him a basement layout would be the highest expression of fatherhood. Sixteen years and thousands of hours later, this project, “the outgrowth of chance meetings, unexpected friendships, mistakes, illness, latent ambitions, and sheer luck” was completed. But for Posey, the creation of his
Rating: 
(out of 16 reviews)
List Price: $ 13.95
Price: $ 6.99
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Review by M. Rosen for Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale
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Seeing this book was a surprise, I’d only ever thought of Sam Posey as a race commentator. I’m glad I bought it – Posey does a wonderful job of weaving his history of model railroad interest with the history of the hobby, the background of the actual railroad he attempts to recreate with his layout, and the people and places that are the “rock stars” of model railroading. Anyone who has ever had a railroad set will recognize Posey’s (and his acquaintances’) child-like enthusiasm for trains, both real and modeled. He travels all over the country meeting some of the top modelers and visiting their layouts and has a wonderful articulate voice for description of some of the ‘characters’ and their unique visions of what a model railroad should be.
So why did I give this book only 4 stars? For one, I wish there had been some photos of some of the wonderful layouts he describes. There are none, just a couple of cover shots of his layout. This is especially odd since he devotes a portion of the book to describing his efforts to photograph others’ layouts. The other reason is that I don’t grade on a curve, and a 5 star book has to truly move me and be something I know I’ll read again. “Playing With Trains” was fun and educational, but it’s not quite at that level. Still strongly recommended.
Review by Michael Carnell for Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale
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This book really captures the spirit of an activity and frame of mind so many of us return to. Model railroading, and the love of trains in general, is something that many of us pick up as a child and then abandon until we get older. After the mid-life crisis are finished, we finally have the time and hopefully the money to enjoy some of the things from our youth. I for one am planning my layout now! Maybe that is one of the reasons I picked up this book. Wherever you are in yor journey, I highly recommend Playing With Trains. It is an enjoyable read with some excellent insite.
Review by Michael Bloch for Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale
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Sam Posey’s writing style has been described as articulate. I would call it both articulate and captivating. It is hard to put the book down, you want to keep reading. When I finished it, I was disappointed to have reached the end, I wanted more.
The reader is immediately drawn into a fascinating world that melds realism and imagination in a unique and inviting way. It is not really about toys or the trains themselves, as much as it is about the effect they have on those who venture into the hobby.
Sam describes a train’s disappearance into a mountain tunnel as adding dimensions of mystery and anticipation to the layout. And, in many ways, that describes the essence of the book itself.
It seems inevitable that this book will become a catalyst for new model train layouts of various sizes and complexity being constructed in basements across America.
Even for those who really have no interest in trains, this book is enjoyable, intriguing and great fun to read.
Review by reader for Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale
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This book is a gem and a page-turner. It is a lot of fun but it is also deep, a masterpiece in fact.
When a child takes off in an airplane for the first time, he may react very strongly to the optical illusion, as the plane climbs out, that houses, trees, cars, and people are shinking into miniatures. At first the child may be made uneasy by this shrinkage but, with the pro forma voice of adult reassurance (no, they are not really shinking, we are just moving further away) the illusion of tiny houses, barns, trees, people — whole cities in miniature — becomes a source of quickening delight.
This is why people love scale models. A big part of what the brain does, all day every day, its main job perhaps, is to judge size and scale. A human brain moving though the world constantly seeks clues, references, that will tell it whether an object, a tree or a building, say, is 1) tiny or 2) far away.
The size of a building can be quickly determined — the eye counts the number of stories. But a tree — mature trees of every size, from five feet tall to a hundred feet tall — may have identically the same shape and structure. To help the brain judge a tree’s size and distance, the eye hunts for a size reference of some kind, maybe a woman or a dog standing under the tree.
If it finds there instead, under the tree, a huge package of cigarettes, or a huge human hand — signaling that the tree is in fact tiny — the brain laughs out loud. It delights in miniatures: exact scale models.
And the brain is repelled by departures from perfect scale. Lionel trains of the 1950s, for example, were supplied with a non-scale track — three rails instead of two. This bothered a lot of people, me included, and that noxious third rail is a leitmotif in this book. Whole railroads have been built, it seems, to undo the damage done by that third rail to the perfect illusion of scale.
If you put time into the scale equation, as you approach or draw away from an object, then the game of guessing the size of a distant object becomes a key to assessing speed and distance. The faster you drive, the more important the question of scale becomes to your survival. Adding in the axis of time also gets you into the problem of history — personal history, railroad history.
It seems especially apt that Sam Posey, an artist and a Ferrari racer (he won Sebring) would be fascinated by the concept of scale. In this book he weaves the basic human delight with, and fixation upon, the problem of time, speed, size and distance into a wonderfully elaborate and personal story of scale modeling in the “real” world; it is really a very sophisticated book, in which time and space become playthings, taffy to pull, and history collapses into the present moment.
It is also a great narrative about his life, and about how he built his scale model railroad. There are really two books here. Part I is literature, a self contained essay about Posey and his railroad. Part II is journalism, visits to other people’s railroads, railway journeys, essays. In this respect it is kind of like a DVD, with the actual movie (Part I) plus a surround of interviews and how-we-did-it’s (Part II.) . Absolutely first rate.
Review by Michael J Edelman for Playing with Trains: A Passion Beyond Scale
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I happened across a copy of Playing With Trains at a local bookstore, and from the first page I was hooked- the author’s enthusiasm just jumped right off the page. I was immediately transported to my youth, and my long gone Lionel Southern Pacific set, screaming accross the ping-pong table top layout. Then I camed across the author’s reference to racing cars for a living, and glanced at the cover- of course! Sam Posey was not only one of the friendliest and most likable men ever to set foot in a race car, he was, and is, a great story teller. Back in the 70s he’d written a book about his life in racing (The Mudge Pond Express) that may be the best book ever written about what it’s like to be a race car driver. Posey’s prose style is right up there with Tracy Kidder or any of the best contemporary non-fiction writers.
The tale begins with Posey’s own childhood trains, and then jumps to the birth of his first son, and the construction of what begins as a simple oval but becomes a fifteen-year obsession. Along the way we’re introduced to other model railroaders, and we learn a bit about the makers, the sellers, the hostory of railroad and model railroading, and of course Thomas the Tank Engine, who personifies railroading for so many children of the eighties and beyond. There’s even a trip on a full-sized train, as well as Posey’s experience driving a full-sized steam locomotive for the annual April Fool’s road test in Road and Track magazine. At one point in his fifteen year oddyssee Posey is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease- something that chnages his perspective a little, but doesn’t slow him down in his pursuit.
Serious model railroaders will find fault with this book- there are no layout diagrams, no closeups of engines, and none of the detais and minutia that make up the model railroader’s hobby. That’s okay, though, as this book wasn’t written for them. It’s really for anyone who has owned a model train- or perhaps wished they’d owned one- or anyone who has looked longingly at the elaborate layouts in hobbyshops and department stores of the past, and thought how nice it would be to play with trains again.