“It’s beautiful.”

A grown man is purring over a toy.

“For a start, it’s not a toy. It’s a model. Even says so on the box.”

Mildly offended, more matter-of-fact.

“You would not want a 5-year-old playing with this.”

This thing of “beauty” is a model steam locomotive – a J Class, a legendary servant of New Zealand Railways out of the 1950s, a train from another time, a romantic time in New Zealand travel.

It’s a hefty wee thing – about 1.2kg of brass and white metal precision engineering with an equally hefty price tag.

“Comes as a box of bits for more than $2000,” said Darryl Judkins of the Tauranga Model Railway Club. So 2000 reasons you wouldn’t want a 5-year-old playing with it. But it’s just the ticket for a 60-something-year-old big kid.

Then that “box of bits” requires special tools, special fingers, a special touch to assemble the locomotive.

“It’s pedantic work, precision work, very specialised,” said Judkins.

Because they’ve taken a 100-tonne, 21-metre steam locomotive and shrunk it 64 times. Every last detail – the 4-8-2 bogey configuration, the valve gear, pistons, the smokebox door and smoke stack, the coal bunker and water tanks – everything that bought this huffing, hissing, spitting, chugging beast to life, in real life.

It’s a hobby, but the enthusiasts have made it an artform. And therein lies the ‘beauty’.

“It’s the way it’s engineered and constructed,” said Judkins. “Go on, take a close look.”

I do, and even though this layman doesn’t know a coupling from a connecting rod, he can appreciate the workmanship.

“And that all means it runs superbly well. A smooth, even, realistic speed, operating very comfortably in this setting. Nice to see, nice to watch.” He’s trying to paint the picture for me, because while I am seeing, he senses I am not understanding.

“It looks like the real thing. And that’s what we strive for – reality!”

Immense satisfaction and a thing of great beauty. Mmm!

Is this Ab705 passing near Ohakune the real thing or a mock up? The modellers strive to make their layouts as real as possible. Photo: supplied.

The reality for me was climbing aboard a steam train in Dunedin in the 1950s, I am sure it was a J Class, and being hauled three-and-a-half hours to an Invercargill school holiday with Aunty Irene – what a treat. Soot-laden windowsills, passengers scrambling to close windows from the smoke when the train entered a tunnel, no pee-ing while stopped at a station; then trying to pee between stations as the train heaved and rocked on the narrow 106 mm gauge track. Then the storming of the Clinton railway station cafeteria – a 10-minute stop for a pie or egg sandwich and tea in cups that could have doubled as foundations for a state house.

The maximum official speed for a J Class was 100 km/h, a bit over 60m/h. But racing across the long, flat, Canterbury plains to connect with the inter-island ferry at Lyttelton, those big 56-inch wheels would creep over 70m/h or 113 km/h. I recall the J Class racing and drawing away from the State Highway 1 traffic which ran alongside the track.

Now that “thing of great beauty” – the model J Class – is parked up on a Lilliputian siding at the Model Railway Club’s Sulphur Point headquarters. It’s a 1:64 scale version of the Katikati railway yards of 70 years ago, right down to the faithfully replicated trees, bushes, paths, walkways, vehicles and sheds, when steam ruled, before the station burned down, before the tracks were dug up and developers drove their life-size bulldozers on to the site on the northern fringes of town.

The railway yards might be gone, but they’re not gone, they have just contracted to 1/64th.

Not all trains are the same…uh,uh!

“I don’t like English trains,” says Trevor Gardiner, a life-long enthusiast. His preference is European trains, German Marklin models. But don’t ask him why. Marklin does them well. And expensively. You can pick up one online for $6500, and another for a more modest $3589.

Gardiner was genetically drawn to trains. His dad was an NZR porter, guard, shunter, you name it.

“But he never took us to see trains. That was just him.”

Probably because after eight hours of ingesting smoke and soot at work every day, he had had enough.

“But he spiked an interest,” says Gardiner, gratefully.

Gardiner’s father always thought he’d one day end up working for NZR, but he chose the builder’s hammer over the stoker’s coal shovel.

“Don’t ask me why the interest in models? Why does anyone get interested in anything?”

Yes, why indeed?

Next week the club will pack its entire model railway network into a trailer and cart it down Cameron Rd to Tauranga Boys’ College for the annual Tauranga Model Railway Show from 10am-4pm on Saturday, January 18 and Sunday, January 19.

Gardiner and Judkins would be delighted to take you for a 1:64 climb up the railway engineering marvel that is the Raurimu Spiral, or a miniature romp around the Katikati railway yards.

They will also share and explain the “beauty” of a J Class steam locomotive. For more information on the show, visit the club website.

- SunLive