Model train takes over villa bedroom

Villa resident Gary Brown always wanted to build model trains, but the time wasn't right until early 2019. That's when he dove into the world of N scale, which is about 1/4th the size of the more familiar O scale (think Lionel trains). The smaller size affords a lot of details - and Gary built so much into his "train city" that the bed in his and Donna's spare bedroom had to go!  Take a look. 

The first thing you notice about Gary Brown’s model train town is its sheer size. It takes up nearly the entire third bedroom of the villa he and his wife, Donna, have called home since 2008.

As you get closer, the intricate details delight: Trees ablaze in fall color. A campground dotted with tents, Airstream trailers and canoeists on the water. Lighted windows in the shops and homes. Signals that flash and crossing arms that close where streets intersect with track.

And let’s not forget the trains, all six of them: three for passengers, one for tankers, one for containers, and another carrying John Deere tractors. They meander from one end to the other. Gary uses a command station to change directions and sound their horns.

“I’ve pretty much got it finished now,” he says, but you get the feeling he might still make a few tweaks. After all, he’s been working on this hobby since early 2019. He started with one base module, then decided to add two more – that’s when the extra bed had to go.

It’s all built at N scale. The Lionel trains you may recall from childhood are O scale, about four times larger.

“You can pack so much more in a small size, and I’ve got a lot going on here,” he admits. His layout includes neighborhoods, shopping districts, an implement dealer, barrel factory, industrial areas and a park. The design process unleashed a creative side Gary never knew he had.

“I’m more a geeky kind of guy,” says the former business owner. “And so the artistic part comes when you’re doing the build of the model as you look for things to make it more realistic, the trees, the grass. And that’s what I’ve never been good at before.”

Gary enjoys it so much that he’s not done yet. He’s working on an even smaller Z scale model in their garage, and last summer he laid tracks outside for an O scale that Do