In her most recent letter, Helen Washburn notified Ginny and me that husband George has taken over the entire basement of their house in Columbia, Mo., and is busy with the project of modeling his sizeable miniature train layout after the environment he best remembers in Idaho. I was struck dumb by that ambition, which must include not only hills and fruit orchards and railroad stations and stores with parking lots and cars, but tiny people walking the streets.

When I was an 8-year-old kid, my dad bought me one sheet of 4-by-6 plywood, which he stained an unnatural brown and set it up on a pair of saw-horses that he'd constructed. Then he wished me good-luck with the big, new Lionel trains he'd just given me as a Christmas present, and went upstairs to fix himself a drink.

In those days, the late 1940s or early 1950s, my Lionel locomotive and attached tender were about as heavy as a non-portable Royal typewriter, and took up enough space to fill two place-settings at our big dinner table in our dining room. By the time I got married (1964) and tried to dispatch all my extra bachelor "stuff," my Lionel trains, in their cumbersome track gauge, had become collectors' items. At that time, model trains were switching to a much smaller gauge (was it HO gauge?).

Well, I had no idea what my old Lionel trains were coming to be worth, so, on the eve of my wedding, I gave them all to my wife's cousin Jimmy. I didn't know I was discarding a fortune.

I appreciated Dad's gift of Lionel trains, a railroad station, a trestle, a cattle-loading mechanism, and a million other Lionel appliances and utilities, including a simple overpass with threads dangling from it, to warn hoboes and other boxcar riders of an approaching tunnel or other hazard to their heads. This last my father made for me, and, in retrospect it meant more than all the other pieces combined.

To show my appreciation, I constructed a layout that used the maximum number of track pieces and appliances, had my sister help me bring to the basement a number of chairs that would accommodate both parents, various aunts and uncles, and whoever of my parents' friends happened to be visiting at the time. This was our "train show," by which we demonstrated how many "tricks" my train could perform. When I had my Lionel locomotive, tender, and various cars and the other appliances running, it was like a three-ring circus.

I suspected my parents and their friends' patience was not as great as my sister's and mine, so I switched on the overhead lights after five minutes, and told our viewers that the show was finished. Thus warned, the audience felt free to walk back upstairs.

At just about this time in my model railroad career, my sixth-grade friend Phillip Jones asked me to come to his house and see his model train setup. When I arrived in Phillip's basement, besides a pair of authentic airline chairs, complete with fire-engine-red TWA markings, I saw a whole basement taken up by his layout, three or four tiny locomotives hauling passenger and freight trains, running simultaneously through a landscape of farmland, small villages, and what seemed to me suburban towns with many super-small automobiles and shops to spare. Suddenly I grew very dissatisfied with my own train set. I wanted small trains -- German-made, I think they were, although I can't remember -- instead of the monstrous Lionel trains I was stuck with. Phillip's trains and landscape looked so much more realistic than mine.

What an ungrateful little wretch I was. Add to Phillip Jones's temptation the incredible layout at the Pelham Manor Model Railroad Club and I was almost a gone goose.

My family had lived for several years in a small New York suburb named Pelham Manor, and when the municipality of Pelham Manor built a new railroad station, the old one went to a club consisting of old men whose hobby was model railroading. Well, by the time my father and I visited this station, on Thursday night, when it met, the layout was truly astonishing. There were dozens of trains running simultaneously, stations filled with toy commuters, cows in the nearby fields, and a host of other activities. After an hour in Pelham Manor, I was doubly dissatisfied. Of course, the moment I found myself yearning for trains like my friend's, and the ones at Pelham Manor, I began to feel enormous guilt.

How would I explain this situation to my dad? How could I? Suddenly, I felt like an unappreciative scoundrel, an unworthy cad. Strangely, it was a feeling that never went entirely away.

Still, as the world's population steadily grows larger and takes up more and more of the unchanging amount of space on planet Earth, the trend toward miniaturization proceeds apace. In a recent New Yorker short story, a man is driven by a mania for reducing the size of objects, no matter how small already, until he arrives at a puzzling point. "And so he set to work on his invisible kingdom, with its walled cities and winding rivers, its forests of beech and fir, its copper mines and temple towers, its spoons and insects. By the end of a year he had completed a single city. The city contained cobbled streets and market squares, baskets of grapes on the fruit sellers‚ stands, merchants‚ houses with pillared balconies overlooking courtyards, individual bottles in the glassblowers‚ shops. He felt tired and exhilarated, and as he imagined all that remained undone, stretching out before him like an immense adventure, he found himself wishing that he could reveal his work to someone. The solitude of his task was never oppressive, but from time to time, in the pauses of his day, he felt a touch of loneliness." And so it goes. The time eventually comes when the models he builds are too small to be seen by the human eye.

A couple of years ago, Ginny gave me, as a Christmas present, a lovely Victorian-era electric locomotive, a tender of like design and gauge, and a couple of cars, together with enough lengths of track to make a small circle. Not only that, she constructed for me a couple of tables large enough to hold any reasonably-designed track layout. It was a labor of love, and I can't say why I haven't yet run my train on it, I guess it's so large -- much larger than my old Lionel locomotive -- that I can't really see it as a model train. A little larger and I could ride in it myself. But it was given in a spirit of love, and I'm determined to set it up one of these palmy weekends.