Stock photo from the internet - NOT dad’s model railway :)
One of my earliest memories growing up was when we lived in our house in Butterworth, Malaysia. I was about 5 or 6 years old, and I remember that upstairs in our house, we had an entire room dedicated to my dad’s hobby at the time, which was his model train set. There was a huge table in the middle of the room that took up most of the space, and on it was a marvellous mini village, hills and tunnels with railroad tracks leading all the way around it. Inside all the cupboards along the walls was an entire collection of colourful model railway engines, carriages and rolling stock.
Being so little, I wasn’t allowed to handle the models myself, but I could be the engineer sometimes and manage the controls to start, stop, and control the speed of the trains under close supervision. The smell of white craft glue (used to build the diorama), or that particular model engine oil (used to lubricate and also to generate the smoke stacks) still brings those memories flooding back.
I know that when we moved house (as we frequently did back then, as dad was routinely transferred to another state as part of his role as senior medical staff in the government), he destroyed and threw out the whole table, keeping only a handful of model trains and controls.
I never thought about those trains since we left Butterworth.
Many years later, in the late 70’s when we emigrated from Malaysia to Australia, I know that we ended up either selling, throwing away or even burning most of our possessions as we could not carry much to the new land where we would be rebooting our lives.
Though I loved building plastic model aircraft, I never got bitten by the model train bug, so never even though about that old model railway village, except for the occasional time that I would see pictures of it in old family albums.
Then, on my 40th birthday, my dad and my father in law took me out to a bar at the wharf to celebrate, and my dad presented me with a small cardboard box. When I opened it, inside were some old Fleischmann and Hornby engines and carriages from back in the day. All vintage now. All hand painted by him.
I was astounded. I thought these were all given away or thrown out decades ago, but somehow, my dad kept them and transported them over to Australia even though what we could bring was severely limited.
For the first time, I realised how much this hobby meant to him. It was obviously a passion that he enjoyed outside of his stressful career. I know now how much it must have taken from him to get rid of that model railroad village that he had painstakingly hand built over years - and to turn his back on it knowing that he would probably never get the chance to build something like that again.
Dad passed away a decade ago now, so he will never get the chance to see those carriages scoot around a track again, but I will always treasure them as a part of him, a part of his heart that he handed to me, and that one day I will hand down to my own sons. Perhaps someone in our family will one day build a little railroad village and carry my dad’s (and my own) memories around those tiny tracks.