The biggest layout Earl ever built — close to twenty feet by twenty feet — filling a room in Michigan, and the oldest work in this archive. A whole town under one roof: a main street, a church and cemetery, a treehouse, a quarry, trains running on several levels, and a Pennsylvania Railroad keystone hung on the wall above it all. Photographed across 2012 and 2013.

Autumn 2018, and the benchwork goes back down to bare plywood and foam. These photographs follow the second Michigan layout from an empty room to running track.

He had the building made for the purpose. An Amish crew built it by hand and delivered it to the back yard on a trailer in the summer of 2022 — and that is where their work ended and his began. Every single thing since is Earl's: the insulation, the wiring, the walls, the benchwork, and everything running on top of it. Six or more trains run at once now, through tunnels and over bridges, past switches and through several towns. Accessories he has had for decades were stripped, repainted and restyled back into service. The ground cover is lichen and whatever else does the job convincingly. He calls it Earl's Train Station.

He built it for the museum's 2023 Christmas layout, to bring more people through the door — and it worked. The Rockville Bridge is about fifteen miles from Mechanicsburg, and he chose it for exactly that: a piece of Pennsylvania Railroad history standing in his own back yard. Every part of it is his own hand — foam cut with a hot wire and a saw, arches shaped one at a time, then painted and aged. Look above the arch openings and you will find soot: he darkens the stone where decades of steam exhaust would have blackened it. Nobody asks for that. It is the reason his layouts look the way they do.

The Mechanicsburg Museum Association has been saving the borough's railroad history since 1975 — the 1866 Stationmaster's House, the 1867 Passenger Station, the 1886 Freight Station and the 1899 Washington Street Station, all built by the Cumberland Valley Railroad. Earl leads the crew that builds the model railroad inside them.

When Earl retired in 2012 he went to work on a steam locomotive. Pere Marquette 1225 — a 1941 Lima-built Berkshire, one of the few mainline steam engines in America still under her own power — was due her fifteen-year rebuild at the Steam Railroading Institute in Owosso, Michigan. He drove up one or two days a week for a year and a half and did a bit of everything, but the job that took the hours was the staybolts. A new firebox went in, held by more than four thousand of them, and every one needs a weep hole drilled down its centre — a telltale that vents steam if the bolt ever cracks, so a failure announces itself instead of hiding. They ran from seven inches to thirty-one. The long ones took ninety minutes apiece to gun-drill. He had tool-and-die training and a career in engineering behind him — more than fifty patents' worth — and he enjoyed it.

Hand-picked from a decade of Earl's phone: railroad museums and roundhouses, garden railways in three states, tunnels and viaducts on old railbeds, steam excursions, the Rockville Bridge from the ground, and a brass locomotive model built on his own workbench.