Bedroom & Upstairs Railroad

My grandfather was beloved for his Attic O Scale Layout, but in the years after his passing, a different kind of layout came to exist in my life. When Papa moved on, Dad began to collect things off of his layout, and in those following few years, we took enough to start one of our own. This one was also in an attic (my childhood bedroom that is, on the top floor of a mid-century Craftsman house), but it was a little less permanent. We had boxes of tracks and buildings and locos, that we kept in the basement—but that came out every few months to create the Bedroom Layout. That attic bedroom was near-on 400 square feet, which meant more than enough room for an impressive temporary rail-loop. I have good memories of Papa’s layout, but my memories of our bedroom one are much stronger.

We always ran the loop under my bed, in a great big circle around the room. Instead of being set out by a sky-blue background and paintings of locomotives, this one was framed by pink walls, dollhouses and stuffed animals. Dad cut out construction paper, and we made roads and lakes, which we set up most precisely between little houses and stores. We had a bank, a Pegasus gas station, a jailhouse, a movie theatre, and of course the paradigmatic train station. Everything a miniature town might need. A little older now, I had a specific yellow two-story picked out as “our house,” and had designated a handful of tiny people as every member of our family. A cool man with sunglasses was Dad, the woman in the LSU colored coat was Mimi, I was the little girl in the pink dress, and Papa was of course the stout old man with a sharp hat. Additionally, there was the typical cast of model-town citizens: the mayor, the sheriff, the men playing chess, the hobo, the ice-skating children, the train-travelers, the porter, and the fat ladies eating ice cream. It was quite the bustling place. What’s more, with a fine set of O Scale gondolas, I had a perfect opportunity for cross-cultural intermingling. Those gondolas carried not logs nor boulders, but indeed Barbie dolls, on their way from one end of the room to another. They fit rather comfortably in the length of a car, and I hope their travels were satisfactory. In my older years, I was allowed to really run these trains, and oh, what a joy that was; to spin the dial — slowly, Dad would caution — and hear those little engines spur, and watch the the C&O switcher rhythmically come to speed, and make its way around my own room, past the closet and stairs, and of course, under the bed. We spent hours up there, listening to music and running the train — mixed, as one might expect — with me creating a fanciful little world of my own, and my father simply happy for the chance to run said trains. Those memories are some of the fondest of my childhood.