The Pawtucket Armory’s drill hall, with train sets. (Photos by David Brussat)

My little building collection. (Click to expand.)

Fire afflicts rowhouse along HO-scale trackage.

Train-set scenery for sale.

Spent an hour at the model train show in the Pawtucket Armory on Sunday afternoon. Superlative setups, though not as many as we had hoped, and most were linear, with mostly HO-scale trains choo-choo’ing up and down long, narrow platforms past fires in old buildings or through mining villages in the mountains, that sort of thing, rather than winding through deeper, more extensive sets of scenery. For me, much of the allure was in the miniature houses and other buildings that filled the scenery along the tracks.

But excellent as this tiny architecture may be, it does not qualify for inclusion in my miniature building collection. While these examples do feature the sort of detailing I seek, they are purpose-built scenery for trains, mostly of plastic, rather than the evocations of culture (okay, tourist tchotchkes) that I look for when I go to other cities and countries. Some nations seem prouder than others of their built heritage. You cannot turn around in the Netherlands without stumbling upon examples of Dutch architecture for sale. But I searched up and down in shops and outdoor markets in Taiwan for a temple, a palace, a pagoda, even a Taipei 101 (then the world’s tallest skyscraper, which resembles stacked Chinese takeout; the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, is tallest now). I finally found the pagoda, and it sits proudly amid my collection. But it was a close-run thing.

By the way Jane Jacobs, in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, notes that while much real scenery along our actual railroad tracks features miles and miles of decay, some of the plants and other buildings, however tumbledown they are today, were once newly erected architecture of some considerable ambition. It was not always assumed that the train took us between one wrong side of the tracks seen from both sets of passenger-car windows. By the way, the inlets along the Connecticut shore between New London and New Haven are among the loveliest scenery along the eastern seaboard. (Heading south? Sit on the left side of the train, with a view to the east. Heading north? Vice-versa.)

Here is my miniature building collection. Actually, the pagoda is hard to see, its crown poking out from behind Notre Dame. (Link coming soon, but check out recent post on starting a traditional-building development archive a week or so ago.)