A Love for Christmas, and Memories of a Bygone Era, Mark Worlds Created by Train Enthusiasts
Jim Buydos grew up playing with a model train in the basement of his home, and then went on to serve in the U.S. Army’s reserve 729th railway operating battalion in New Haven.
So about 35 years ago, when his boys, then 8 and 10 years old, expressed an interest in model trains, he was thrilled.
They set up a table in an upstairs bedroom of their modest Branford home, laid some track, bought some trains, and had some fun. Then the boys grew older and moved on to baseball and football and other pursuits.
Buydos took a long look at the table and the trains and the track, put a heavy wool blanket over it, and reluctantly moved on, too.
Mark Castiglione, who owns Branford Hobbies, a two-story building packed with hobby supplies on West Main Street in Branford less than a mile from the Buydos’ home, sees that quite a bit. Parents and grandparents connect with their children and grandchildren over the love of things that move and make noise and, often, evoke their memories and notions of a bygone era.
Some stick with it, others move on.
In his shop, as dusk faded into darkness on a recent weekday evening, several men talked model trains, planes, and automobiles and the children in their lives. One older man was looking for something for his grandson. A younger man was video-chatting on his phone with his friend, one who lives on a tiny Dutch Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela, who was looking for a present for his son, something he was sure could be found only in this Branford shop.
‘Tis the season, Castiglione says.
The connection between model trains and the holidays was forged in the old days when trains would transport not only things like lumber, and stone, and coal, but also people traveling home to celebrate Christmas. Train tracks around the Christmas tree, and a long tradition of trains in holiday movies, continued to reinforce the romance between trains and holidays for subsequent generations. For the older folks, maybe it’s White Christmas, where Bob and Phil travel from sunny Florida to Pine Tree, Vermont on a train, sitting boy, girl, girl, boy in the club car with their love interests Betty and Judy. For the younger generation, it’s the Polar Express, based on the book of the same name, where a steam locomotive inspired by the mighty Pere Marquette 1225 makes its way to the North Pole on Christmas Eve, and the Christmas bell that rings can be heard only by those who believe. There was an uptick in interest in model trains after Polar Express, released in 2004, says Castiglione.
Then there are those who love trains for their own sake. In his 50s now, Castiglione remembers as a child waiting for the Amtrak trains to go thundering by. It was sheer entertainment.
Wide-Eyed and Innocent
He turns back to his customers and I wander away in the first floor of his shop. Underneath the huge model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and a row or two away from the packs of tiny figurines used by model train hobbyists, I find a rack of magazines. I pull out the Kalmbach Publishing Co.’s Modeling the ‘50s, The Glory Years of Rail and leaf through it.
The articles evoke an image of men gathering to watch the fights on the black and white television set, while the women congregate in the kitchen to play Clue or Sorry, only to rush outside upon hearing the approach of the train whistle, to grab the clothes from the clothesline before they get covered with soot from the train. The trains, “big, powerful, gritty, dramatic, interesting, fast, and noisy,” carried elegantly dressed people—no flip flops or cutoffs!—to faraway places like Altoona, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
“They help us remember times when we were wide-eyed and innocent. We didn’t know that passenger train service was declining and that being a railroader was dangerous work,” I read. “All we knew was that trains were, to use the vernacular...swell. ... Thanks to model railroading, we can turn the clock back and resurrect the magic of the ‘50s.”
Steven Cryan, an artist and model train enthusiast from Old Saybrook, agrees those years hold a special fascination. Cryan has been the guest curator of the holiday exhibit Trains, Tracks, and Trimmings HO train exhibit at the Connecticut River Museum, on Main Street in Essex, for 24 years. He also has a model exhibit at Pizzaworks restaurant, on the Boston Post Road in Old Saybrook.
“I like to focus on the era between 1940 and 1950, when there was a transition from steam to diesel, and that allows me to run both,” he says. His intricate layouts, presented in a huge display at the river museum, include cars, roadways, bridges, trees, tugboats, water towers, a Howard Johnson’s, and a lighthouse. Drawing upon local history, there is a witch hazel company, a river, docks, fishing boats, and fishing villages. And, of course, the trains and tracks tie it all together.
He hates it when he sees kids at the exhibit with their nose in their iPhones. He loves it when people spend hours immersed in the world he’s created. This year he has an “I Spy” list that lets people discover new details. An interactive part of the exhibit lets kids push buttons and make things happen. He’s equally proud of his wife’s art work, also displayed at the museum. Mostly, he’s excited to share his love of trains with others.
“It’s a thread that runs through my entire life. I was in the military railway unit in the army. And when I was a kid, I had the American Flyer train around the tree. It grew into a whole room and then you just go from there. I started building scale models and then I went to the museum and it just never stopped,” he says.
As it turns out, Cryan served in the same military railway unit in New Haven as Buydos. Cryan was getting out as Buydos was getting in. When I visit Buydos and his wife Susan at their home in Branford to see the trains, he tells me how he found that out.
Poppa Gets Back to Work
Six years ago, when Buydos’ grandson Trevor was three, Trevor opened the door to the spare bedroom, toddled into the room, and peeked under the blanket. He saw the train tracks. Buydos remembers him saying “grandpoppa finish this.”
And so he did. He reconnected with model train enthusiasts and met people like Cryan. He went to train shows. He visited Branford Hobbies, first when it was owned by Mark’s father, Frank B. Castiglione, and then after that by Mark.
Susan tells me he was at the hobby shop so often she took to calling it his second home. As I climb the stairs to the second floor to see the trains, I see the stairwell lined with intricate examples of needlepoint and embroidery. I ask Buydos about it, and he proudly tells me they are mostly his wife’s work.
And then I see the trains. Drawing upon historical research, visits to the nearby Stony Creek Quarry, his knowledge of the coal and timber industries, and his imagination, Buydos has created a whole world on that table, all of it connected by the train track. His Stony Creek Quarry includes a big crane, a crane house, and a detailed model of the classic pinkish gray granite pit in the quarry. On the other side of the river there is a sawmill, with a turning water wheel, and a waterfall with special light effects. There is a high line timbering operation that moves logs off the top of the mountain down to the sawmill. There is a Pennsylvania-style coal mine. Buydos’s father took him down into a coal mine when he was ten years old, and he wanted to replicate his memories of that.
There are small men loading the mined coal above ground, and, underneath the ground, small men working like ants digging out the coal. Buydos flips a switch and where the train track ends under the earth, a very tiny man gets to work with a click, clack, click of his pick axe as it moves it back and forth in the coal mine, under the small blue light on his helmet.
As the magazine article I read earlier acknowledged, this is a wide-eyed and optimistic take on history. I don’t remember seeing any figurines in the shop that would have accounted for the hard dangers of working in the quarries, in the coal mines, and in the timberlands. And I didn’t see any figurines representing women’s work and their unpaid labor that kept families whole in the face of low wages paid out, and the high prices charged at the company store, women farming, foraging, hauling water from the creek. Looking at the detailed, efficient, orderly world created by Buydos in his spare bedroom, I feel like a Grinch for even thinking these things.
And then I spot the women in Buydos’s world.
In his fanciful idyll, women have their own place, apart from the men, on the highest part of the mountain. Six tiny women, completely protected by a thick stand of evergreen trees, are happily bathing and cavorting, in various stages of undress, in a mountaintop pool. If farming, and foraging, and hauling water, and worrying about how to put food on the table awaits them later, in this Normal Rockwell-esque moment, they are having fun in the sun with their friends. I am struck speechless by this intimate lady pool atop the mountain where the men are laboring underneath, wrenching coal, and stone, and trees from the earth. I feel as though I’m intruding on an intimate moment. Then I remind myself these are just teeny tiny figurines. I look over at Buydos.
“It’s high enough that the children can’t see it,” he assures me. We both laugh.
Downstairs, we rejoin his wife Susan, who is working on a cross stitch project while the Hallmark channel plays softly on the television set in the family room off of their immaculate kitchen, illuminated by a tall tree, completely covered with elaborate ornaments, most of them made by Susan. She says hobbies are the key to a great marriage.
“It’s a great stress reliever, and it keep us from killing each other,” she says.
As they get older, they are downsizing, getting rid of things, giving things away. They are already down to one large Christmas tree from two. They wonder aloud what will become of the small world Buydos has created in the upstairs bedroom.
At four-feet by eight-feet, it will not fit through the bedroom door. It isn’t going anywhere. “If we ever sell this place, we’re going to have to advertise it as a three-bedroom house, plus a train room,” Susan says.
She says one of their sons started calculating how to take out an upstairs window and move a wall and...Susan stopped him when he started talking about opening up walls. When they move to their next home, they seem resigned to leaving the trains behind. And maybe that’s OK. The grandchildren are beginning to move on to other interests.
Still, for now, the spare bedroom, and the walls covered with needlepoint, and the hallways adorned by paintings, and the Christmas tree filled with handmade ornaments represent several generations of work by Jim and Susan, and by their parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents. It feels special, and like the holidays, and like the purest form of creativity for creativity’s sake.
Photographer Kelley Fryer contributed to this story.
The 24th annual Holiday Train Show at the Connecticut River Museum, 67 Main Street, Essex will run through Monday, Feb. 19. More information is available at www.ctrivermuseum.org. Branford Hobbies is located at 609 West Main Street, Branford, and more information is available at www.branfordhobbies.com. For those who are interested in finding out more about how to get started, Buydos recommends attending the Railroad Hobby Show at the Eastern States Exposition, 1305 Memorial Ave., West Springfield, Massachusetts, on Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 27 and 28, which is billed as the largest show of its kind in North America. For more information on that, visit www.easternstatesexposition.com/events/2018/railroad-hobby-show. Buydos also said that, his time and schedule allowing, he would be willing to show his train project to a few people at a time in his home. Call 203-481-0194 to ascertain availability.