So yesterday, while walking back from my mailbox, a car came down the road driving at that speed that tells you they are lost.
As it drew nearer to me is came to a stop and the driver asked where the road went. I told him is was a dead end, and so it does not go anywhere, and asked where he would
like to go. He said he did not even know that! He added that he needs to buy a bunch of tote containers suitable for packing trains into.
Well, I explained that I did not think the hardware shop in our village would carry totes, and that he would have to drive about 45 minutes in either of three directions to get to a town with a suitable store.
I then asked about the trains.
He said they were packing up the trains for someone in their club who died recently, just up the road. I knew there was a man on our street who had G scale trains and that he had not been well, so I knew who he meant right away. So we exchanged the details of all that and then I said I also have trains, German ones. Me too he says, he has some Märklin!
Now, Märklin is not common in the USA at all. Most modellers are 2-rail and of course US centric so it is truly amazing to come across someone who has Märklin trains, even more so in the backwoods of Maine.
I suggested he spends 5 minutes and see my layout, and directed him to drive on about 100m to my house which he would know as it has a
replica of a German train signal outside.
So I showed him my
layout and ran a train for a few minutes, and we exchanged contact information.
After he had gone back up the road to the rest of the team packing up the trains, I collected all the spare plastic totes we have (we had a bunch that had no lids) and drove them up to the house and gave them to them. They were packing up carloads of G-scale trains and buildings.
I will have him over sometime and run the layout properly!
He does not have a working layout, but is building a set of stacker layers for all the trains he has, which range from G scale all the way to Z.
