NO ONE PUTS AFX RACETRACK AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TREE:

The Express Track to Delight (NED CRABB, 11/25/08, Wall Street Journal)

The gleaming black engine, its powerful headlight spearing the darkness, steams through the night trailing a long line of maroon passenger cars and Pullman coaches, their lighted windows winking past the observer. Smoke billows from the engine, a whistle blows and then suddenly . . . the rails ahead have separated! The engine plunges off the track, the passenger cars uncouple and crash to the dining room floor, and the engine plows into a chair leg.

That boyhood memory of my beautiful Lionel train set, given to me on a long-ago Christmas, intruded into my thoughts as I drove toward the annual exhibition of the New York Society of Model Engineers in this hilly New Jersey town, where on a clear night one can look across the Hudson River into the bright lights of mid-Manhattan. Wherever did I lose track of my wonderful train? I thought as I pulled up to the sort of drab building I wouldn't have even noticed had it not had the street number I was seeking. Ah, but inside the building . . . inside was a thrilling miniature world where I found, symbolically, not only my train but that of every boy who has ever grown old wondering what happened to his toys.

For three weekends in November and December the Model Engineers -- the oldest model railroad group in the U.S., formed during World War I and incorporated in 1926 in New York -- open the doors to their two "railroad empires" of hundreds of O gauge and HO gauge trains. Greeting me was Andy Brusgard, vice president of the Model Engineers and the man most responsible for this exhibition.