uastoral Passion
Nostalgia for simpler times — and hopes for a grand future — fuels a Birmingham collector's vision.
WRITTEN BY LISA BRODY I PHOTOGRAPHS BY GENE MEADOWS
Above: This is my
view of the gentrifi-
cation of downtown
Detroit if I could
rebuild it," explains
Douglas Bloom.
B 1 6 •
JUNE 2009
•
J-N platinum
In Douglas Bloom's world, there are no strife, no poverty and
no hunger. There are, however, a drive-in theater, a carnival, a
coalmine and charmingly renovated Detroit streets.
Bloom has created his own magical world via model trains.
On the 1,800-foot track he built in the lower level of his
4,000-square-foot Birmingham home, eight computerized
trains can run at any one time, traversing bridges, towns, hills,
farms, oil fields and bucolic countryside. A log roller picks
up "cut logs" and places them on open train cars. A milk car,
crafted in the style of real ones circa the 1920s-'30s, looks
exactly like the first operating accessory he bought at age 14.
"It's my world," says Bloom. "It's 1940s-era cars and build-
ings and trains mixed with 2000s-era cars, buildings and
trains, and everything in between. It represents my life and
the many things that I did or saw in both business and travel."
Bloom, 70, first fell in love with model trains at age 11,
when he saw a friend's Lionel model train set. He asked
his own parents for one, who put him off by telling him he
couldn't have one until he was 13. On his 13th birthday, which
fell between Christmas and New Year's Day, he once again
asked his parents, who took him to Ned's, on Woodward and
Clairmount in Detroit, "one block from Temple Beth El, where
we belonged, but which did not do bar mitzvahs in those days,"
Bloom recalls. "I got a Lionel starter set, with a steam locomo-
tive, two freight cars and a caboose." He built a table for it with
plywood and two-by-fours, and he was off.
A frequent hangout was Black's Hardware on Livernois,
continued on page 18