These aren't your fathers toys — oh wait, yes they are

Wally Tift of Portland gets a closer look at model trains rumbling past a miniature Vancouver and Columbia River Gorge on Saturday at Hudson’s Bay High School. (Zachary Kaufman/The Columbian)

You might assume a model train show to be a place for children.

Yet kids were few and far between during the 35th annual Great Train Swap Meet at Hudson’s Bay High School on Saturday. No wonder. Some 90 vendors sat at tables selling intricately detailed locomotives and boxcars for hundreds of dollars.

This isn’t kid’s stuff anymore.

From Z-gauge models as small as your finger to G-gauge trains big enough to tote a house cat, most of the trains on display Saturday had to be fully appreciated through the eyes of an adult.

David Dansky brought just a tiny portion of a massive collection that now covers row upon row of shelves in his garage in Ridgefield. His collection includes a 105-year-old electric train built by model railroad pioneer Joshua Lionel Cowen himself, though it’s being displayed at a museum in California.

“I call these ‘BT’ toys — Before Television,” Dansky said.

Model trains have been a lifelong hobby for the 70-year-old Dansky, whose earliest memories include riding the old 20th Century Limited from New York to Chicago during World War II. For the young Dansky and his pals, the latest Lionel or American Flyer was today’s equivalent of an Xbox or Wii.

“You waited for the catalogue at Christmas,” he said.

As much as anything, the room full of collectors underscored the lengths to which people of a like mind will go to accumulate, compare and build on their particular passion. Dansky supposed there is something in the American psyche that drives this need to collect.

“We’d collect toilet paper if we’d figured out some way to differentiate it,” he said.

Dansky views the trains as impressionistic art, distinguished by color, shape and a sense of kinetic energy embedded in the design. Others fixate on the tiniest of details, right down to the number of rivets in a steam locomotive.

Color schemes, logos and styles are at least as varied as the railroad companies themselves. For just one example, the railroad serving Vancouver — BNSF Railway — is the corporate progeny of 390 different railroad lines that merged or were acquired over 150 years.

Richard Renihan, president of Southwest Washington Model Railroaders, notices an unrelenting increase in the number of trains rumbling along the tracks crisscrossing Vancouver. This, he thinks, foretells an enduring interest from children who can’t help but notice more than 100 trains rumbling through the city every day.

Even though it’s modeled on a mode of transportation rooted in the 19th century, Renihan said you can’t rule out the possibility of train swap meets for another 50 years.

“You never know.”