Why grow up when you can play with trains?

Model railroading in all scales and gauges. HO talk welcome :)
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Garry K
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Joined: Thu Sep 15, 2005 3:18 pm
Location: Livonia, MI

Why grow up when you can play with trains?

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The Detroit News has an article about the Chi-Town Union Station & West Oakland Railroad Museum in Commerce Township. Article at http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinio ... /98177878/:
Fred Burton showed up five or six years ago with an armload of old train magazines he figured the railroad museum could sell. He’s been there ever since.

OK, he leaves sometimes, though there actually are a couple of beds tucked away where the public can’t see. But his heart and his expertise are all aboard at the Chi-Town Union Station and West Oakland Railroad Museum in Commerce Township, where the volunteers can be kids again and kids can be awestruck.

A never-ending labor of love, the Chi-Town claims to be America’s largest O-scale model railroad, and none of the gray-haired children working on their own layouts around the country have ever called to dispute it.

More than two miles of track. More than 160 engines and 1,000 train cars. More than 13,000 pounds of plaster, with another half-ton coming. Two houses’ worth of lumber to hold it up. A computer system to run it all, and late last Friday afternoon, Burton at the throttle — “dispatcher,” they call it — with his eyes on the screen of an Acer PC, tracking the trains.

Ask him what keeps him there, what makes such devotees of a crew of mostly retirees, and his first answer is one word long: “Control.” But surely, there’s more to it than that.

The Chi-Town will be open only two more weekends, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday through Sunday, before the doors close until November. Owner Paul Gribbell of West Bloomfield and the corps of 10 volunteers will be hard at work in the meantime, tweaking and repairing and expanding and having the best darned time since they were 7 years old and there was a Lionel making circles around the Christmas tree. [...]
Garry K

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