Working on a railroad: train aficionado creates large layout

The little town of Oram has an old ice house, a Boraxo plant, a slaughterhouse, a corner store, a police station, a newspaper, a pet shop and a supermarket.

Like most places, it also has its more unsavory side, with a sleazy bar and hotel and a bunch of Coke bottles strewn around the railroad tracks in one of the less reputable parts of town. Its boundaries lie inside the boundaries of Las Vegas. In fact, it sits in one room of a Las Vegas resident’s home. Oram is part of an elaborate model train setup.

“People come in here, and they don’t want to leave,” said David Goulbourn, who built the train set, which includes four levels of tracks and five trains, not counting the trolley in the streets and the train that brings passengers to the top of a ski slope. “The governor has been here, and we ran trains with him.”

Goulbourn has been working with model trains for as long as he can remember, but it’s only been the last 30 years of his life in which the passion became his occupation. The set in North Las Vegas is in the home of Kent Oram, a well-known political consultant.

“This took me about 2 1/2 years,” Goulbourn said. “We built one part, and Kent wanted it bigger, so we built the other part. It’s 32 feet by 30 feet now.”

The setup includes a smaller town on one edge, a downtown area, a ski slope and a logging camp, all connected by scale miles of track. Five trains can operate on it at once, pulling about 100 cars among them.

“I had to build this matrix to run it all,” Goulbourn said, flipping open a wooden control box to reveal a set of wires and switches. “They don’t just go around in circles. You can back them up, separate cars, link other cars and work it all just like a real train switch yard, all from this panel.”

The setup has been featured in several magazines dedicated to train enthusiasts.

“I don’t think there are any like that in the valley,” said Martin Van Dyke, co-owner of model train shop The Train Engineer, 2550 Chandler Ave., Suite 53. “There are a few other big ones and a few with that kind of detail, but I can’t think of any others that have both.”

The size of the layout is the first thing that strikes most people when they see it, but the longer you look at it, the more the detail reveal themselves.

The tiny Coke bottles are almost too small to see, but they add detail and texture along the tracks. People are swimming in a stream and fishing. Along one part of the tracks is an ash pit for dumping out the ash from locomotives, and there are animals hiding in the forest. Even with Goulbourn pointing and describing the location, it took some time to spot the bear and the startled people standing near it.

“I buy the buildings and paint them myself,” Goulbourn said. “If you’re lucky, they’re already built, but that’s not always how it is.”

He said he takes photos of old buildings, signs and trains so he can duplicate the look of the wear and decay on the models. He pointed out a carefully crafted rust streak on a train that added to the reality of the scale model.

“We carry mostly trains,” Van Dyke said. “Dave’s shop is just a few doors down, so when people come who want a setup, we send them down to see him. It’s convenient and works out for us both.”

Goulbourn gets his parts from two train supply stores in town, the other being the Train Exchange, 6008 Boulder Highway, owned and operated by Dick Hughes.

Neither carries many of the tiny-scale people, which are all over Goulbourn’s setup. Goulbourn gets many of them online. There are around 1,500 people and about the same number of trees. There are 450 people in the carnival, which has a slew of moving rides with lights than can be set into action with the flip of a switch.

In the past, Goulbourn has built setups in pieces at his shop, Dave’s Custom Model Railroads, 2550 Chandler Ave., Suite 51, and moved them to the final location, but he prefers to build the main base and landscape on site.

“I build a frame out of 1-by-2s and put MDF (medium-density fibreboard) on top of that,” Goulbourn said. “For mountains, I start with strips of cardboard and then lay plaster strips across it.”

He covers the whole thing with his own mixture of commercially available paper pulp and plaster material with additional plaster. It dries faster but still creates a satisfying texture.

The Oram setup includes a crawlspace and several places to pop up in the middle to make repairs. The build is long over, but the upkeep is a steady job.

“I’m over here about twice a week to clean the tracks and make sure everything’s in working order if Kent wants to come out and use it,” Goulbourn said. “I’m between projects right now, hoping I get to work on something like this again soon. I’ve got a few ideas I want to try out.”

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor, email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.