Big passion for minuscule models

POINT RICHMOND --MAYBE it's a matter of conquest, taking the might and clout of a huge heavy-breathing lug of a locomotive and shrinking, shrinking, shrinking it down till it fits in the palm of your hand. Or harnessing a mountain's majesty, not by moving it -- that's child's play -- but by building your own from scratch.Maybe. Or maybe it's just because guys love trains and miniature ones are easier to fit in the garage. Or in this case in the 10,000-square- foot building of the Golden State Model Railroad Museum at Miller- Knox Regional Shoreline Park in Point Richmond.

Here you'll find California's expansive railroad system -- condensed. There are three separate-but-equally-giant miniature layouts in different scales and gauges from various eras. There are engine models ranging from the last great steam locomotives to the most modern and powerful diesels, alternately steaming, chugging and roaring along with tiny freight or passenger trains in tow.

There's a lot of track. It stretches out and around and up and down and back again, and you can hear these trains a comin', comin' round lots of bends in this delightful behemoth of smallness full of miniature trains and hills and valleys and cars and rivers and tunnels and towns and little people shrunken to the size of finishing nails.

Guess they figure the bigger the place, the more small you can have.

"We like miniatures, but on a grand scale," said John Edginton, the museum's spokesman, a lawyer and longtime lover of model trains who got hooked on the hobby like most model railroaders did -- back when he got his first Lionel train set under the Christmas tree.

The museum is open nine months of the year, from April through December (they always have a popular Christmas display). Regular hours are from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and admission is $3. Sunday is best, because the trains are running. Otherwise you just get to look at the layouts, which are still cool. But the trains are the thing.

Visitors also are welcome Fridays at 7:30 p.m. during the club's weekly work night. They're pretty much always working on the layouts, and some members probably feel like they haven't seen the sunshine since they don't know when, but those trains have to keep on runnin'. And nobody really minds.

As we speak, entire mountain ranges

are forming in the warehouse. The makings of Donner Summit rise at the south end of the building.

Walt Freedman pounds on the new mountain, standing on some wood framing behind it and rising up over its peak. He's on top of the world, looking down on this creation. He smiles and waves his cordless drill at some fellow model railroaders, then disappears again behind the scenery, down into the cramped, hidden inner sanctum of framework and miles of multicolored wiring.

The museum is run by members of the East Bay Model Engineers Society, one of the oldest model railroad groups in the country, originally formed in 1933 in the basement of Grahme Hardy's Book Store in Oakland. The museum opened in 1985.

There are about 100 club members on the books -- all men in this batch. And if the God of Model Railroading is found in the details, then these gentlemen are religious zealots.

"I'm a retired engineer, and I like working with my hands," Freedman said, having come down from the mountain. "Except scenery. I love working on the scratch-built buildings, but I hate doing scenery. Too tedious. John here spends hours and hours on a piece of landscape that's the size of your hand."

Edginton bowed his head in mock embarrassment. "Yes, some of the work is, well, time consuming," he said.

Indeed, in a recent "Model Railroader" magazine, an article was devoted to making "cattails, lilly pads and pond scum," complete with a sub-section on "choosing your scum color."

There are special modeling techniques for everything from water to craggy mountains -- sometimes made out of formed resin, or plaster in rubber molds or crumpled foil.

"You want everything to look as realistic as possible," Edginton said. "We're striving for as much accuracy in our prototype models as possible."

A "prototype" model is basically duplicating a scene from the real world, but with some necessary variations modelers call "selective compression."

"You obviously can't put the Tehachapi Loop as far from Bakersfield as it really is," Edginton said. "So you have to compress things."

The museum's three layouts are in O, HO and N scale, all running both standard and narrow-gauge tracks. "People often confuse scale with gauge," said club member Phil Gale. "Gauge is the distance between the rails.

"And scale is the size of the trains," Edginton said, "which evolved in a number of different sizes, basically because people had built layouts in limited spaces in their attic or garage. There's even a Z scale, which is so tiny you can build a layout in a briefcase."

N scale is popular: about 1/16 of an inch to a foot. O scale is 1/ 4 of an inch to the foot, and HO is about 1/8 of an inch to the foot.