The train that isn’t there  I had planned to go a model train
exhibition in January—nostalgia left over from Christmas
time—but I had the date wrong and when I showed up at the
Library Volunteer Fire Company and Social Hall, the exhibit had
been packed up and put away for another year, another place.
Somewhere in my part of the world are people who arrange these
trains into model environments urban or rural, assemble the
tracks, do the miniature landscaping, maintain and run the
transformers that made them run. Clean and polish them, too.
Model trains are a type of world-building.  The last model train
setup I saw was at, of all places, a plant nursery. The trains
must have been put up as a draw to customers, and on that day
they were doing their job. Families were all over the place, two
and three deep at the display. They were buying plants, too.
Why would anyone build a model train exhibit? For the pleasure
of working on something that absorbs one’s whole attention. for
the pleasures of world-building, an