with it, and these days, he said, his model train set fills a room in his home and features something like 1,500 cars. He calls his imaginary line, based on the Southern Railway, the Saluda Central Railroad. Charlie Crawford of eastern Cobb County bases his HO layout on the New York Central Railroad as it would have appeared in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York in either 1927 or 1952. He switches them out, based on which period he wants to replicate. The main difference between the two, he said, is the introduction of diesel locomotives. The 69-year-old retired facilities manager, who was
born in Brooklyn and lived in New Jersey for 23 years until his job brought him to Atlanta, wants his trains to be accurate historically. “I’ve always enjoyed history and it’s a good way to make history come alive,” he said. “The railroads were certainly a big part of what built this country.” He has another interest in model railroading: playing with others. He’s part of a group of modelers called Atlanta Interlocking Model Railroaders who build modular HO layouts that connect with layouts made by other club members. “I like to build things,” he said. “I’ve always been a model-maker, even when I was a kid. I’m a builder.”
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New York policeman, a master model railroader, said he’s owned train layouts since he was a kid. He works with HO models, which are the most popular size model trains and use cars much smaller than the garden-scale ones. “I’ve been interested in it all my life,” Glock said one recent morning as he worked on a new building that could end up on the 15-foot-by-27-foot train layout he estimates takes up about a third of his basement. He says he has 80 locomotives and a couple of hundred freight cars in his collection. “It keeps you sharp. There’s carpentry [required], there’s electrical, there’s mechanical.” And newer parts are all digital, he said, so he must keep up with the times. But the strongest attraction of the hobby now, he said, is social. “I’ve made a lot of friends,” he said. “We’ve become fast friends for almost 20 years.” Like many other HO model train fans, Glock has built his layout to recreate a specific time and place. In his case, his trains come from 1950 to 1955 and represent the fictional L&N and Southern Railroad in western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. “I needed an imaginary place to set my railroad,” he said. “It makes it plausible.” Liles, the Piedmont Division’s 55-year-old superintendent (the club takes its titles from the ways
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railroad companies were organized), says he got interested in trains, the real ones, when he was a boy. “I was fascinated by trains,” he said. “When I felt that power, I was hooked. … It was something about the horsepower, the strength of the locomotive, the skill, the weight.” He got a taste of that power in the 1970s, when his dad worked for a south Georgia company that made vegetable oil. He accompanied his father to work and watched the trains load the oil and move cars of it around. Sometimes, he could catch a ride. “I’d bring my lunch with me and ride with the train crew,” he said. Liles got his first model train set at age 6 and got his first HO set when he was about 8. He stayed
JULY 2020 | AtlantaSeniorLife.com
Charlie Crawford
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