COLUMBIA, S.C. -- A train sounds in the distance, and Columbia groans.

A line of cars and trucks stack up, exhaust pipes fuming. Drivers fuming. People are late for dinner, for class, for band practice. Boxcars crawl past. Somehow even more follow.

Two miles north, no one is upset. Everyone is happy. Trains chug along undisturbed, even celebrated.

By 9:30 this Thursday night, the members of the club Associated Model Railroads of Columbia, have spent more than two hours watching their engines circle a track. They’d stay longer if they could.

The club is open to anyone in the public every Thursday, 7-9 p.m., “but it’s more like 6:30 to 9:30,” club president Dean DiAntonio said. “We’re usually kicking people out.”

Tracks of different sizes are laid out in fields and next to power plants, with tiny towns full of tiny people waving as the locomotives pass, all hidden away in the basement of a historic munitions arsenal on Laurel Street, where the club has gathered for 30 years.

For all of those years, the hobby has bound people together, even here in a city otherwise bound by its scorn of train-caused traffic jams. Old and young, the club’s members are here on Thursday night. Some worry the past-time has gone off-track in a screen-centered world that can leave people feeling disconnected. That’s not the case here, though.

“We’re late tonight because we were at the train track,” said Lauren Pruitt, whose 14-year-old son Jaxon drags her to the clubhouse every chance he gets. She was even club treasurer for two years to support his passion. Jaxon, unsurprisingly, hopes to work for a railroad company when he gets old enough.

For most of the members, the fascination isn’t contained to trains in miniature.

Everyone here seems to have a story about going to the train tracks as a kid. Their dad did one thing or another that brought them to a rail yard or else they lived nearby. They all say there’s something humbling and exciting about 10,000 tons of hurtling steel.

They will cut across traffic to catch a glimpse of a freight train that most in Columbia pray to avoid. Ask any member of the club and they can tell you when their favorite train was built and how it impacted American history.

Some people can do this with music or movies.

1941: Orson Welles premieres Citizen Kane. Bob Dylan is born. And the Union Pacific Railroad launches its first Big Boy dual engine.

“It’s definitely fanatical,” said DiAntonio. “When the engineers and conductors of real engines see us on the side of the tracks taking pictures, they call us foamers,” as in, foaming at the mouth.

An expensive hobby

The men, mostly gray-haired or no-haired, take turns adjusting and controlling an American Flyer model train from 1949.

They stand over the mountains, Supremes of a land created for one purpose – to watch this model train chug around in a circle, time and hopefully time again.

It’s not so strange, really. “It’s very therapeutic,” said Steve Smith. He remembers his first ever model train, a 1953 American Flyer. When he found the 1949 version from a collector in Pennsylvania, he knew he had to have it.

Smith’s work as an architect and engineer takes him all over the country, and whenever he travels he brings a train set. He sets it up in his hotel and his team always wants to play with it, he says with a grin.

But are there people in your lives who don’t understand your passion for trains? The men nod emphatically, several chiming in:

“My wife.” “My mom.” “My girlfriend.”

One reason for that skepticism, perhaps, is the cost.

One of the trains chugging along in the basement track costs close to $2,000. Individual boxcars can easily sell for hundreds of dollars. That’s not to say those are the only options. But members say once someone gets their first train, it can spiral into an expensive hobby.

Let’s make a deal

A jolly-looking man named Ed approaches Ken Jackson’s table of goods at Columbia’s Jamil Temple with intention. It’s two days after the railroad club meeting, and many of the members are here as well, displaying their trains.

“Can we play ‘Let’s make a Deal’ here?” Ed wants to know. He recognizes Jackson from last year’s train show and already sees what he wants: a New York Central railroad car, and a similar Pennsylvania car. Plus some track accessories.

“I’ll do $40, $40 and $15,” Jackson tells him, which Ed seems to find reasonable.

“We can do business,” he says, then pulls out a wad of plastic shopping bags he gifts to Jackson for later patrons.

Several times a year train modelers and collectors gather and trade. DiAntonio said a lot of new collectors come to these shows to start their collections because they can get used pieces for much cheaper. Jackson has been doing this as a member of the Palmetto Train Collector’s Association for 50 years.

Across from Jackson sits Steve Anderson, who traveled from Hendersonville, North Carolina to sell his wares at the Jamil Temple show.

Last year, Anderson went to 14 of these shows across the country. He buys and sells estate collections and has found amazing vintage engines in random attics and garages.

He has loved trains all his life, his brother too. But the hobby is different than it used to be, a little lonelier. Train sets used to be sold at Sears. Now it’s a niche interest.

There is a glimmer of sadness in Anderson’s tone. He spends his time collecting dead people’s treasures and selling them. Wherever they end up next, he hopes they are loved.

‘I think I can, I think I can’

A boy shrieks and wiggles in his dad’s arms. “It’s James!” he yells, so pleased to see the anthropomorphized North Western Railway’s red number 5 engine and friend of Thomas the Tank Engine — the human-faced blue train you may remember for his namesake TV show and inspirational, “I think I can, I know I can,” refrain.

Anderson is right that model trains are not the hobby they once were, but younger generations have still found their way into this fanatical world. Mostly thanks to the perennial children’s program.

“Like most kids, I started out with Thomas the Tank Engine,” Chris Kovacs said. “Ringo Starr and George Carlin were my narrators.”

(Yes, you read that right. Some famous Thomas & Friends narrators over the years include: Ringo Starr (UK: 84-86, US: 89-90); George Carlin (US: 1991-96); Alec Baldwin (US: 1999-2003); and Pierce Brosnan (UK/US: 2008))

Kovacs has been a club member for the last four years. He’s made close friendships and has even started helping some of the younger members build their own collections by gifting from his own.

Nearby, 23-year-old Erik Daunheimer and 21-year-old Leo Iniguez are gushing about Daunheimer’s Freedom Train, a prototypical copy of the American Freedom Train that toured the county in the 1970s to commemorate the U.S. bicentennial.

They watch it roll away from them down the track, boxcars filled with tiny memorabilia, then round a makeshift tunnel and chug back around. Around. Around.

“I’ll never get bored of it,” Iniguez says.

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