D

ouglas Bloom's face illuminates when he recalls a
joyful memory.
In 1953, his family took a cross-country trip on a
series of trains. On the first, a coal-fed locomotive,
the conductor urged young Bloom to stick his head out the win-
dow and feel the wind rush by his bespectacled face.
"By the end of the day, my face was dirty, just black, except
where my glasses were. That part was clean," he says, chuckling.
Clearly, the train bug bit and has yet to let go. Bloom now has
a fully operational world of trains in his Birmingham home, a
remnant of the past and a passion of the present.
"It is relaxing," he said, as he leaned over and gently cleaned
a rail. "What I like is that I can control my own world, my own
environment and I can create it the way I want it."
Truth be told, Bloom began his obsession before he ever
boarded that West-bound train. After playing with a friend's train
set, Bloom begged his parents for one. They gave in when he
was 13.
On cold winter days, he and his buddies would hunch over the
tracks, planting fake trees on a fake hillside and running the train
for hours. As Bloom's love for trains grew, so did his collection,
paid for with wages from his job at Black's Hardware. The long-
gone Detroit outfit hired out Bloom to parents who bought trains
but were clueless about setting them up. With his employee dis-
count, Bloom outfitted eight more tables and bought more trains.
But then came college and adulthood, and the trains were
donated to an orphanage. It wasn't until Doug married Barbara
23 years ago that his passion for tiny locomotives resurfaced. He
subscribed to Model Train Magazine and bought his first adult set.
Since then, he has spent thousands of hours creating rail lines.
Perched on waist-high tables that line the walls of his basement,
the inch-high colorful trains run on rails no wider than a quarter
that line the perimeter and loop back through a series of land-
scapes like a farmer's field or an industrial harbor.
Each scene has been painstakingly put together by Bloom,
with a combination of buildings made from kits and others he
crafted with balsa wood. Some scenes are taken from memories
of past train trips. For instance, a Wyoming strip mine — com-
plete with cranes and coal lumps — is next to a traditional
Pennsylvania coal mine.
"Like I said, I control my own world here," he said, sounding
the train whistle with the flick of a switch.

e.„

Clockwise from top right:

A loading dock and

4

Jill. Davidson Sklar

shipping lane add to the

city's authenticity.

Train tracks loop around

typical city landscapes.

A mini cityscape comes

to life in Doug Bloom's

'TILE AT THE JN • DECEMBER 2000 •