Big Boys' Toys

The only difference between a man and a boy...

… is the price of his toys.

A couple of miles outside the town of Molalla, Oregon is a most unusual park: a place where grown men come to play with their toy trains.

Most of these are scale model replicas of a real steam locomotive that exists somewhere in a museum, and they are built from scratch by the men who run them. They tend to be retired machinists, and a few are mechanical engineers.

They are big enough for an adult to ride on. And they pull little railroad cars that will hold several adults and kids. Some are powered by electric motor + car batteries, some are powered by a lawn mower engine, but the real works of art are the ones that run on actual, live steam, such as this one.

The park is owned and run by an organization called the Pacific Northwest Live Steamers, it is located in Molalla’s Shady Dell subdivision, and is informally known as the Shady Dell Railroad. Thousands of feet of track have been laid around the park’s four acres, and the public - kids and grownups - are able to ride for free on any summer Sunday. There is a donation box to help with the cost of fuel — which, if I remember correctly, is heating oil.

When my kids were small, I used to take them there every year.

The old men who built these locomotives are justifiably proud of them. I talked with one who had made a painstaking replica of a loco in the museum at Sacramento, California. He told me that he had taken more than 200 photos of the engine from which he made the replica. It took him years to build it.

I never got the name of this man in the photo. It was taken in 1987 so he is probably not around any more.

I never had the money, or the skills, or the shop, for these kinds of toys. My toys were cameras. By this time my Exakta (see previous two posts) had bit the dust, and I was shooting with a Minolta XG-1. A fine camera that I bought when my son was born in 1982. It was loaded with electronics: automatic exposure with center-weighted averaging meter, a hot shoe for flash, and a pretty damn good lens. It served me well for years until I lost it in a tragic pawnshop incident. More about that later.

Here’s a picture of an XG-1 that I found on the Web:

Minolta XG-1