01-28-2009, 10:06 AM
Trains were a major part of my life for a long time, too, but this influence was tempered, if not frequently completely crushed, by growing up in a military family that moved every two years, followed by a career of my own in the military in which I moved even more often. "Nothing permanent" was a cardinal rule for the first 38 years of my life, and things like model trains do not survive repeated packing and moving back and forth across the oceans of the world.