My older brother worked at the San Francisco headquarters of Southern Pacific Railroad and the “cars” I grew interested in as I grew up were 40 to 60 feet long and the “engines” I got excited over shook the ground. I still don’t get too irritated waiting at a crossing if I have a view of the crew working a train, back and forth sending a couple of cars down one track and a couple of others down the next with what seems like no effort at all.

Like so many boys, I liked trains and had fun with toy trains. First it was the set of wooden ones, both grooved track and rolling stock held together with metal snaps like on your jacket. Then it was my first Lionel and my brother’s old American Flier train sets.

But then we moved out of the house into the mobile home. I have no memory of the fate of either of these train sets though I think they were around for a while after the move. Probably given away or thrown out because I didn’t play with them; which was probably because of lack of space to set up the track. Looking back there’s a lot I wish I’d been able to keep from my childhood.

I have found that model railroading is so multifaceted that there are almost endless options. From the carpentry of the framework and other 1:1 scale building activities such as the room preparation and lighting, to photography of the finished product, this hobby can become a melding of many interests.

So why was it I picked Z scale?
It’s simple. I’m crazy and do things the hard way.

When, in my dumb youth, I tried smoking, I picked up a pipe. Nothing as simple as pick up, light, smoke, put down. No. I had to choose pick up, load, pack, light, tamp down, re-light, smoke, re-light, smoke, empty, scrape, clean, put down. (I quit long ago.) Now, as I grow older with my eyesight getting worse and my hands not as steady as they once were, I pick the smallest scale available in model railroading. Nope, nothing like doing things the hard way.

But actually, I find Z scale fascinating. When I was in my teens I started with HO. A couple of friends and I formed a club and built a layout in an odd shaped closet in a church near the Junior High School . It was a logging railroad with a number of switchbacks in order to fit. At the time I lived in a mobile home with no room for my own layout so I worked on building rolling stock and a few other projects. Later, when N scale started becoming more common, I started building traction engines out of F7 running gear and parts of passenger cars. There wasn’t much (“any” was more likely) traction available then but I saw street railroads with their tight radius curves as the only way I’d be able to have my own layout, even when I went away to college. A prospect we were all coming to grips with as we gave the layout to the church for their youth group. (I hope someone carried on after us.) But with school, travel with my job afterwards and small apartments I just never got back to model railroading apart from the occasional magazine.

I later settled in Oregon in a rented house. Still unsure of the future of “space” even though I was making progress toward being able to buy a home, I discovered and fell in love with Z scale. The detailing is almost beyond belief. I know HO and the other more popular scales are getting more and more detailed as manufacturing technology has improved. It wasn’t even too bad when I was younger, though it just didn’t seem as much of an accomplishment. But more importantly, even in tight spaces you can run near prototypical trains with Z. At a little over 2 inches a car, a three foot train would mean over a dozen cars. That begins to look realistic. More to the matter of layout size, with just 1 inch on center, a 5 track classification yard fits on a one foot deep shelf. Thinking back, I wonder how long we would have been happy with that club layout once we really finished it. It didn’t offer much in the way of operations.