HOBBIES: Doctors in Training

The coal-powered steam engine has rolled to a stop in the center of a tiny village, directly in front of a two-story building that houses a pharmacy. People are milling leisurely about the neighborhood shops, some engaged in conversation, others simply strolling or peering into windows. Seven or eight men clad in overalls appear absorbed in their daily labors. Next to a store that sells block ice, a lone man steps into a tavern whose front window sports a Schlitz beer logo.

On the distant horizon, a vertigo-inducing roller coaster carries carloads of revelers on its steep, winding tracks. On the ground below, other rides, games, and refreshment stands lure throngs of amusement park visitors. A few people sit on benches beside the lake, watching the sailboats. Two dogs stand nose-to-nose on a wide gravel pathway.

Meanwhile, across town, in a festive holiday setting, freshly-fallen snow adorns a bright yellow trolley filled with passengers. As it whisks by, a couple dressed in layers of warm, colorful, Victorian-era clothing clasp arms as they skate across a frozen pond, in the shadow of a tall evergreen shielding the soft light from the ribbon-festooned buildings behind them. A jocular Santa Claus waves his mittened hand in a friendly greeting.

What might be classic picture-postcard scenes of any rural, small town in historic America eras are actually found today on two residential properties in Lenox, Massachusetts. They’re only small portions, in fact, of vast, spectacular model train setups created in painstaking detail by Jesse Spector, a recently retired hematologist-oncologist, and Gray Ellrodt, an internist,
cardiologist, and chief of medicine.

Spector and Ellrodt aren’t the only physicians in the area who happen to be model train enthusiasts. A surprising number of other doctors are enchanted by the hobby as well. Noel Blagg, an infectious disease specialist who also lives in Lenox, admits he looks forward to working on his model trains after having spent long, intense hours focused on medicine. “I’ve come to enjoy it most as a relaxation,” Blagg says. “It’s a good way to spend a quiet evening.”

John Burnham, an internist in Dalton, Massachusetts, believes physicians are drawn to model railroading because it provides a creative escape from a stressful profession. “It’s really harmless and playful, and it captures your imagination,” he explains. “If you think about it, physicians are dealing with fairly serious issues involving lives of people all day long. With model railroading, you can relax and do something simple and let your imagination run free.”

Ellrodt calls it a peaceful activity. “The worst you can have is a model train wreck,” he says with a grin. “Everyone walks away from it.”

In November 1991, Spector attended a train show in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He’d never been interested in model trains as a boy, but in his late forties, he was suddenly captivated. “I saw a little train layout, and it just pushed a button,” he says. That afternoon his wife brought home an old four-by-eight sheet of plywood that already had track on it and laid it across two sawhorses. Over the next few months, he elaborated on that, making what he calls “the most primitive track imaginable,” using railroad kits bought at train shows. “I put some buildings on it, and that was my start,” he says. “From then on, I was a lost cause.”

Today, Spector’s decidedly more refined layout encompasses about one hundred square feet in a main room that is also dedicated to his collection of clocks and rows of antique dolls that belong to his wife, Patty. “I kept putting on additions,” he says, “then very big additions.” At times, he jokes, negotiating with his wife for more space in the room required nearly as much effort as implementing each intricately designed module.

In contrast, Blagg chooses to focus on the railroad cars themselves, building exact replicas from the 1950s. He’s also done some facility modeling, creating from scratch a precise copy of Winton Place Station in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Winton Place Station holds special memories for Blagg; when he was a boy, his father—who also had a lifelong affinity for railroads—used to take him there to watch the trains. “It was a lovely way to spend a Sunday afternoon,” he says. Blagg readily admits his interest in model trains is rooted in nostalgia. It’s clear he’s not alone. “Most of us end up modeling something we probably knew [when we were young],” he says. “I’ll be the first to admit, this is for me a way of going back and reliving my childhood.”

Blagg’s personal fascination lies in the history of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—even more specifically, in the B&O trains from April 1953. From his father, he inherited piles of train timetables from that era, which he’s encased carefully in plastic and organized between three drawers. “I’m a card-carrying member of the B&O Railroad Historical Society,” he admits. 

Dr. Peter Rentz, a retired radiologist, claims that he, too, was “born into” a passion for trains. His father and grandfather both had lifelong careers at Lima Locomotive Works in northwestern Ohio; his grandfather was a foreman, his father a college-educated engineer. As a boy, Rentz had similar ambitions. “I thought for a long time I might want to be an engineer,” he says. In college, he focused on engineering courses rather than pre-med, he admits, “to keep the option open.”

During medical school, Rentz didn’t have much of an opportunity to pursue hobbies of any sort. “Medicine,” he says, “is an all-consuming interest. You don’t have much time for trains.” But his childhood fascination was once again sparked in the mid-eighties, when he attended the funeral of a physician who had served as his mentor. “The rabbi mentioned [my friend] had rekindled an interest in toy trains the last month of his life,” Rentz recalls. “That kind of inspired me. I went out and got myself a small N-gauge locomotive that very day.”

In his basement in Pittsfield, Rentz is building an historical re-creation of the Lima Locomotive Works in N-gauge (a relatively small scale in which the ratio to the actual train size is 1:160). Like Blagg, he’s committed to absolute accuracy. Among other reference materials, he’s got photographs and an aerial map from 1924—documenting, he says, the likely heyday of the company. He’s finished the headquarters building and the roundhouse and is now starting to work on the water tower. Simple cardboard structures serve as placeholders for other architectural components he plans to tackle in turn.

Rentz has also built a beautifully precise large-scale model (1:12, a size generous enough that a person of small stature could actually ride on top of it, but not necessarily comfortably) of a coal-powered steam engine. Polished and gleaming, identified with bold gold lettering as “Pacific Coast 2,” it sits on a sturdy table next to the one that holds the Lima Locomotive Works. Rentz points to the nuggets of coal in the engine’s fire box. “It actually runs,” he says. The only thing is, it weighs three hundred pounds, and it’s tough to move it at all without the appropriate tracks—which, as it turns out, he’s also in the midst of building. He plans someday to run the engine out the window and into the backyard, creating what’s known as a garden train. That project, he says, will likely take a couple of years.

Burnham and Ellrodt both have impressive O-scale (1:48) model railroad setups. They’ve gone through the same phases of interest (as have, it seems, other middle-aged men with trains in their blood). As boys, they had their own Lionel trains and enjoyed railroad-related activities with their fathers, but as they reached their teens, other pursuits beckoned, leaving trains behind. Burnham’s interest was rekindled in 1980, when his future father-in-law in Buffalo, New York, invited him to go to a few train stores; Ellrodt rediscovered the hobby in 1996, when he moved back east with his family and found his old trains in his mother’s house.

Physicians accustomed to spending days (and sometimes nights and weekends) in conversation with patients and colleagues, often discussing life or death issues, are drawn to the solitary, quiet nature of train modeling. In this mode, they are completely in charge, free to plan layouts and scenes and details and systems integrations without fear of life-threatening complications.

And they do plan—they research and sketch pictures and wrestle with options, putting into play well-honed analytical skills. If there’s a problem, they fix it. This is an intellectually driven pastime, to be sure—but it’s also an artistic one, appealing to doctors’ right-brain sensibilities. Creative finesse is a critical part of the process. “It really felt like I was doing the Sistine Chapel,” laughs Spector.

Working alone on their trains seems to suit most of these physicians just fine. (His wife and daughters, says Blagg, teasingly acknowledge that “Dad’s at his thing.”) Burnham’s wife, Ann, a former engineering major, will occasionally help with wiring, and Rentz’s wife, Mary, an artist, sometimes paints backdrops. For the most part, though, their spouses don’t seem to have too much hands-on involvement in the building effort. Ellrodt (who is, interestingly, the only one with sons as well as a daughter; the rest of the doctors have only daughters) has managed to lure all three of his children into the fold. When he built his first train layout as an adult, he strapped his infants into their car seats and propped them in the middle of the work table. A few years later, he invited them to join in the plastering.

“I was always looking for a hook,” he admits. “I didn’t want to be down here playing with the trains alone.”

His daughter, Grace, now eleven, has been the creative force behind the Christmas village portion of the most recent composition, a massive three-level layout with multiple trains powered by seven transformers. The theme is mid-twentieth-century New York City, with four distinct parts: the city itself, an outlying suburb, the distant countryside, and a holiday-themed Victorian village overlooking it all. Jack, Grace’s twin brother, determines the design of the city portion and helps with the wiring, laying of track, and building of platforms.

Somewhat glumly, Ellrodt says that Jack is the only child who is active in the Berkshire Toy Train Collectors, a group of about twenty-five that gathers each month to view various layouts. “It seems to me on one level [this hobby] would be great for kids,” he says reflectively. “They learn about electrical wiring, and they learn how to build things. They learn to think and design. But in reality, in comparison to video games, it’s slow moving.”

No detail in Spector’s remarkable miniature landscape (HO scale, 1:87.1) has been unaddressed or left to chance. His hundreds of buildings are duly weathered, the varied terrain is real-color perfect, and every vehicle, sign, apparatus, and character is redolent of a specific time and place in mid-twentieth-century America: southeastern Pennsylvania from 1945 to 1952.

Spector strives for realism in every scene. He admits to trying to see through the imaginary lens of the characters he places, asking himself questions like: If I worked there, what would it look like? Piles of sawdust surround men cutting wood. Minuscule items of clothing—each only slightly bigger than a grain of rice—hang from a backyard laundry line. Tiny colored-coordinated curtains (crafted by Spector from decorative ribbons) drape countless windows.

Blagg is equally meticulous. Thanks to photographs and measurements supplied by his parents, the proportions and scale of his Winton Place Station, he says, are “absolutely correct.” He’s fine-tuned railroad cars by adding windows and moving baggage doors, for example, so that they precisely match their actual historic counterparts; he’s even stripped off rivet patterns so as to create brand-new ones.

“I don’t advocate it,” he says. “It’s tedious work.”

Like most of his rail-enthralled colleagues, Blagg makes a point to travel by train whenever possible. After medical school, he studied for the internal medicine board exams during a roundtrip from Ohio to the West Coast. Since then, he and his family have taken numerous long-distance trips by rail.
Rentz and his wife, Mary, celebrated his retirement by taking a three-week train trip across the United States; they’ve also toured Canada and Europe by rail. These days, though, Rentz doesn’t just ride the trains by sitting in a passenger car. At long last, he’s finally realizing his boyhood dream of becoming an engineer. After serving as coach attendant for the Berkshire Scenic Railway, and having been trained and certified as a brakeman, he’s well on his way toward the one hundred hours of intensive instruction required to become an engineer.

“Planning ahead comes naturally for physicians,” he says. But as a train enthusiast, he admits, “you learn to live with delayed gratification.” (MAY 2009)

Christine Hensel Triantos is a freelance writer living in Richmond, Mass.

THE GOODS

Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum
10 Willow Creek Rd.
Lenox, Mass.
413.637.2210
www.berkshirescenicrailroad.org