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When my husband Bill passed in 2008, he left me with a half-finished HO layout and a freight depot kit sitting on the workbench with exactly twelve pieces glued together. I hadn't touched a model train in my life. Thirty-four years of teaching high school art in Worcester had prepared me to critique …

When my husband passed in 2008 and I inherited his half-finished S scale layout, I had no idea what I was getting into. Sixteen years later, I'm still here, still building, and still convinced that S scale at 1:64 hits a sweet spot between the cramped details of HO and the space demands of O gauge. …

When my husband passed in 2008 and I inherited his layout, I inherited something else too: a bin of decoder boxes he never got around to installing. Back then, getting sound into an N scale locomotive felt like trying to paint the Mona Lisa on a grain of rice. The decoders were too big. The speakers …

When my husband passed in 2008, he left me a basement full of trains and a half-finished layout that made absolutely no sense to me. I spent the first six months just staring at it, wondering why the beautiful 85-foot passenger cars he'd collected kept derailing on certain curves while his little 40 …

Carol Fitzgerald spent 34 years teaching art at a public high school in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is probably why she can't look at a model railroad structure without mentally grading it. She came to the hobby through her late husband's layout, which she inherited in 2008 along with a half-fin …