Model trains

Dale WoodsJanuary 16, 2019

A happy Brit named Alastair Lee has a website devoted to model trains and model railroad layouts. Every day subscribers to his site receive an email with pictures and video sent to him by model railroaders around the world. The miniature scenery, the tiny main streets and train stations, the trees and mountain tunnels are astonishing for their detail. It took me a while, but I know why men of middle age build these tiny worlds. They are recreating the world as it ought to be. And every one of them, to a man, has excluded the giant graffiti that covers the lower third of all the boxcars in the real world.

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A quote from Grommet Hunter:

There is something joyful and satisfying about ramming and ramming the square tip of a three-foot crowbar under the edge of something that needs to go away, and shoving on the crowbar, separating the old thing from the wall, grabbing with your gloved hand at the gap you’ve just created and dropping the crowbar, damn the clanging noise it makes when it hits the floor. Then both gloved hands are on it and the thing you’re tearing out is shrieking and groaning but you have no pity and it hits the floor with a crash of defeat and what you have before you is a blank slate of a wall that could stand some patching. And you will patch it of course you will. But something new will go there. Something that matches your creative vision. That’s why I was there. The shattered cabinets made a wretched pile in the back yard. Like something a tornado might have dropped there.