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On Saturday, J spent the afternoon with her book group, and K and I headed out to Tilden Park and the Redwood Valley Railway. Operating with 5-inch scale (5/12 of full size) live steam locomotives and rolling stock on 15-inch gauge tracks, the train takes you on a 12-minute trip through the rugged terrain atop the hills behind Berkeley. Tickets are only $2. Very, very cool.

(And if you’re chained to your keyboard and can’t get out to something like this in person, check out this nice YouTube video of the railway.)

Just down the hill from the Redwood Valley Railway is the Golden Gate Live Steamers club with its extensive tracks for model steam engines in 2.5-, 3.5-, 4.75-, and 7.5-inch gauges. Serious hobbyists, these. Unfortunately, they only operate on Sundays, so we’ll have to come back another weekend. Twist my arm.

Addendum: So there I am, working on this entry, when I notice that Geekdad has just posted an entry on this very topic. Looks like they were up there on Sunday — and have almost the exact same photo as my lead-in. Hilarious!

My son, age 3, is obsessed with trains. Crazy obsessed. Throwing fuel on the fire, today we took him to a model train expo.

While the G-scale garden railroad layout was the clear winner — the trains ran at his eye level and were enormous — a small display by a local model club off to the side caught my eye (and his attention, briefly). The display was a small fold-out switching layout. No scenery. Only track attached to a nicely finished wooden surface. The entire thing was less than 5 feet long and rested comfortably and inconspicuously on an ordinary conference table. Not surprising that we hadn’t noticed it at first.

A single toggle switch controlled the direction of the single locomotive. No speed adjustments were possible. It could be stopped, moving right, or moving left. Each siding was only large enough to hold 1-3 freight cars. The switches were all manually operated.

The setup was clever in that it was incredibly simple to operate yet challenging as a logical puzzle. The game: to reposition, oops, “spot” all the freight cars as quickly as possible to their arbitrarily assigned positions on the sidings in the least amount of time. According to the guy sitting behind the table and puttering with the wheels, uh, “trucks” of a recalcitrant caboose, the layout is a classic named “John Allen’s Time Saver.”

Flash forward 2 hours. Back at home, wife and son nap as Dad googles “John Allen Time Saver” to learn more. (See the best results here and here.) Apparently, the Timesaver is one of two great switching, er, “shunting” puzzles well-known to model railroaders. (The other is Inglenook Sidings.)

Ingenious! What a great father-son project idea! Build motor skills during construction and operation; exercise logic and planning; and play with model trains all at once.

Actually, now that I think about it, so does the Brio setup that he already has…but that’s not nearly as much fun for Dad.

Addendum: Breaking News! Timesaver has been expressed in the Brio vernacular.

There’s this guy, see. Lives in Switzerland. Makes model airplanes. Scale models. The kind that don’t fly. The kind that just sit on the shelf and gather dust.

Big whoop, you say. Lots of us slapped together plastic models as teenagers.

Yeah, but check out what he’s currently slapping together. And how about last year’s project? Holy tweezers of ivory! What’s this guy do for a day job?!