Medicine has been a fine career for Ted Niznik, a 63-year-old family practitioner from Essex. But he'd rather shovel coal.
Dr. Niznik has always loved trains -- their might, their size, the way they animate Baltimore's landscape. When he retires next year, he plans to trade in his lab coat for a pair of overalls and finish earning his engineer's license. Then nirvana: He'll get into the cab of one of the majestic steam engines that still run at the B&O; Railroad Museum and drive it down the museum's historic 1 1/4 -mile track.
Baltimore is filled with ardent train buffs such as Dr. Niznik. And the city's railroad mania is never more deliriously evident than at Christmastime, when thousands of people flock to firehouses, museums and malls to view that unique Baltimore tradition, the Christmas garden.
In these make-believe worlds, our imaginations run with miniature trains around papier-mache mountains, over trestles, through tunnels and around town and country where fires blaze, dinosaurs clash, and dancers engage in an eternal pas de deux.
"In cities I've worked in from New England to Atlanta, there are other Christmas traditions. But this is the only town where train gardens take such a commanding presence. It's something everyone's aware of," says John Ott, director of the B&O; museum in West Baltimore.
The Christmas garden ritual dates from the late 19th century, when a wave of German immigrants arrived in Baltimore. They brought with them their precious train sets, complete with fragile figurines, trees and cottages. They have become a local art form here, spawning such craftsman as the legendary Paul "Spike" Piker.
The laconic Mr. Piker is president of the Wise Avenue Volunteer Fire Company in Dundalk -- a fire company famous for its #F fantastical train garden. He is also the genius behind Spike's Wonderland of Animation, a company of one renowned for its mechanical Christmas garden gizmos that re-create scenes such burning houses, women hanging the wash and house painters wielding brushes. His creations, which he advertises in a national collectors' magazine, can be found in private and public train displays all over the country.
'A great train town'
Christmas gardens, however, are but a seasonal example of the year-round Baltimore passion for trains, from the mighty iron horses themselves, to Z-gauge model trains, tiny enough to fit comfortably in an attache case.
"It is a great train town," says Dr. Niznik, who as a child, spent untold hours watching steam engines puff along Aliceanna Street.
Baltimore comes by its reputation as a hotbed of train mania honestly. When the first Baltimore and Ohio railroad passenger train ran from Mount Clare Station to Ellicott Mills in 1830, the city gave birth to the American railroad industry. Soon, Baltimore was a teaming hub for the B&O;, as well as the Northern Central, Pennsylvania, Maryland Pennsylvania and Baltimore Annapolis lines.
"It seems like everyone in Baltimore has either worked for the railroad, or had a parent or grandparent who had something to do with one of the railroad lines," says folklorist Elaine Eff, director of cultural conservation programs for the Maryland Historical Trust.
Train obsessions evolve in wondrous and curious ways. But they usually take root in men who have never relinquished the magic of their first train set or the earliest sight of a locomotive roaring invincibly down the track.
Take Baltimore City police Sgt. John Sturgeon Sr. He is a self-proclaimed "Lionel guy" who supports his $5,000 annual model train habit by taking vacation time to work at M. B. Klein, a Baltimore model-train store, during the Christmas rush. "You've heard the saying, 'As the boys get older, the price of the toys gets higher,' " Sergeant Sturgeon says -- with no childlike apologies.
Members of the Baltimore Society of Model Engineers, founded in 1932, are unabashedly childlike in their enthusiasm as well. During a recent holiday open house at their downtown headquarters, six model engineers clad in train hats, bandannas and overalls, sat before two control panels high above their huge layout. Holding to a strict time schedule, they maneuvered 20-odd passenger and freight trains through villages, cities and rugged rural territory.
For John H. Carter, 54, an insatiable enthusiasm for trains took root in a classic Christmas memory. "I will never forget the Christmas when I got up [and saw that] Santa brought everything. . . . I got down on my hands and knees and started pushing that train around. My father said, 'Now watch this.' He turned on this box and the train went by itself. I almost went out
of my mind."
Real, small creations
Train modeling has become an avenue for creating a miniature, but unerring sense of reality for Mr. Carter, an architect who finds joy in exacting dimensions. "The idea is to scale everything perfectly," he says.
From time to time, he visits the CSX yards near Brooklyn for a reality check. With paint and chalk, he has deliberately weathered the N-gauge trains in his basement layout. The rails are made to look rusty. Mr. Carter is experimenting with spray-painted coffee grounds to make life-like foliage for the layout's trees. Even shadows cast by his trains must look authentic.
For Bruce Hamilton, a retired industrial engineer, nothing less than building scale-model engines from scratch satisfies his railroading passion.
"We all have something from childhood that gets its hooks in you," explains Mr. Hamilton, who has never forgotten the 1927 "Fair of the Iron Horse," a grand B&O; centennial celebration at the Halethorpe fairgrounds.
In a large machine shop behind his Catonsville home, Mr. Hamilton, 78, has spent thousands of hours wielding tweezers, studying blue prints and cutting parts from sheets of steel. He makes his own bolts, nuts and rivets.
Mr. Hamilton's latest baby is the Greenbriar 484, one of the last Chessie System steam engines built in the late 1940s. On this project, he has logged four thousand hours of work and calculates another 3,000 to go. When it is finished, the engine will join another of Mr. Hamilton's creations at Leakin Park, where the Chesapeake and Allegheny Steam Preservation Society runs its trains -- to the delight of the children who ride them.
Mike Citro's train lust takes an entirely different shape. The basement of his Overlea home is lined with shallow shelves holding 86 vintage trains, including his childhood Lionel train set and his wife's uncle's American Flyer train set, vintage 1928.
Beyond the shelves, is Mr. Citro's vast, permanent Christmas garden, built on five tiers, complete with year-round Christmas tree. Unlike other train buffs, Mr. Citro, 60, is not a stickler for scale and visual reality. Instead, his layout is a vehicle for fond personal memories and family history.
The carved wooden animal figurines were owned by his Uncle Paul. The scale-model home with the big front porch is a replica of his wife's childhood home. A log cabin on a hill was made once upon a time by the the crew in a nearby fire house.
"I always say they're not worth anything because I don't want to sell them," Mr. Citro says, as he surveys his trains and the possessions that inhabit his carefully tended Christmas garden. "They'll be here when I'm gone."