Like certain relationships, they ultimately don’t go anywhere.
I’m not a train person and won’t claim to have read all 100 posts from nine years ago but, from the first handful, I find it interesting that the schism comes in part from “women like living things and interaction, etc”. Because I always figured that at least 50%, if not more, of having a train layout was all the land and cityscaping and building out the forests and mountain lakes and towns full of people with buildings and light-up windows and other associated world elements. It’s basically a dollhouse for boys.
Indeed – and note that landscaping, forestry, urban and industrial planning, also tended traditionally to be male-dominated fields. Basically, the girls were expected to shape to their taste what’s inside the home, boys what’s outside.
True. Though, curiously, plenty of women love their miniature Christmas villages full of tiny post offices and city squares and light-up retro movie theaters with little village folk placed hither and yon. My sister has a bajillion dollars invested in that stuff and a huge spread that comes out for two months a year. Heck, often they even have a train!
I find this division rather fascinating, and it pervades many stereotypically male hobbies and professions. The wood shop is more important than the furniture that’s built, the cameras and lenses are more important than the photographs, the lawn mower and other yard maintenance tools are more important than the yard, etc. Is this a result of the hunter/gatherer brain being so into tools? Desmond Morris in his mini-series The Human Animal from 1994 posited that railfans and bird watchers (among others) are taking part in a modern pseudo-hunt where the kill is a photograph. Railfans stalk their prey and chase it down, often leapfrogging it to get even more hits with the camera. That’s not entirely analogous to model railroaders, but model building is a subset of collecting/hunting/acquiring behavior that is still rather more male-dominated.
My husband is a (retired) engineer. He is very messy and can and does work in an environment so chaotic I can barely stand to look at it from a distance. From within this horrendous mess he pretty much can fix anything that is even remotely fixable, from a circuit to a broom handle.He is not stalking or gathering his kills or anything, he is making things work (emphasis on ‘things’, here; he’s pretty awkward with live beings) and I also think Desmond Morris is more full of shit than the average bloviator.
I’m not a girly girl and never at any time was one. I am very attuned to animals and plants, and that’s not a feminine or masculine trait, in my experience. I know both men and women who are, and who are not.
Women historically have charge of feeding and clothing their families, which is a reason why a lot of their hobbies line up with those jobs. I’m old enough to remember when cooking and sewing was taught to girls in public schools.
There’s a lot of things women (not ‘females’) are supposedly interested in that I never have been, like fashion, uncomfortable shoes, make up, cupcakes, dolls, pink, other people’s babies, and making sure everyone is emotionally comfortable.
It is mysterious to me why some people actually like machines, but I accept that they do. Machines are not complex, even supercolliders are not complex, compared to a handful of soil, or a bean plant. They are just products of our minds, which can’t conceive of how complex the universe is, much less make anything comparable to what a hundred million years of evolution has. It’s laughable to think so.
I also very very very strongly believe that every single technological achievement has a dark shadow which we refuse to see or deal with. All of them, from the printing press to satellites. There are no exceptions to this. And that is one of the main reasons why I don’t like machines. They remind me of the darkness we always unwittingly unleash with every new kind of machine.
I know nobody thinks like this but me. Particularly people who love things like model trains.
so why didn’t he get me a pony, huh?
I like model trains just fine. I had HO and N circuits as a kid, on boards my parents made for us. But I like other things more (not makeup, pink, dolls, or baking).
Great! You set up the Xmas garden and I’ll bake up some banana pudding and it’ll be an interesting Noel. 
I’d had model trains as a kid; when COVID hit in 2020, I got back into it, and bought a number of N scale locomotives, cars, etc. I didn’t built a permanent layout, but I’d set up an oval of track and a train, and just watch it go around. It was definitely meditative, and soothing, during a time where distractions were sorely needed.
I haven’t read all the intervening posts, either. But I find it interesting that the fourth post says:
– as a reply to a thread claiming that women/girls don’t like model trains. Which look to me like they require patience and dexterity to put together.
Reminds me a bit of the time somewhere in the late 70’s when I shut up a (male) friend of mine who was going on about how women tended to wind up in all the jobs involving “fiddly” piecework because of course as everyone knows women have better manual dexterity than men. I said ‘yes, that’s why, as everyone knows, women are all the great guitar players.’ (To his credit, I think that got his mind working.)
– I was fascinated by train sets (and for that matter garage sets with cars and trucks), on the rare occasions when I got a chance to be around them. They didn’t look to me like they were just a matter of going around in circles, but a matter of shunting in various directions and building the tracks and building the entire towns around them; and you’d get to readjust things when you felt like it. But it never occured to me to ask for one; I certainly wasn’t a perfectly socialized 1950’s little girl, but some of it had sunk in.
my take on this:
- the lenses/cameras, (and all their specs and the rationalization that you need this 35-70 f2.8 lens to shoot xy or z)
- yard machines,
- 4x4 vehicles (and them kitting out and modding )
- 12 electric guitars
just to name a few that I have been involved with … become a fetish for the real thing.
Just as for some people, high-heels and silk stockings (fetish) may become somewhat of a supplemental act or mental representation for the real thing (sex-act) … that was it for me in those hobby-worlds.
often the main act is fairly short (taking a pic) or doesnt occur that often (4x4 tour twice a year or a music gig once a year) … the fetish around it keeps you in the zone of the real act, and that can be prolongued, stretched and be discussed and debated over.
This is especially true for topics, where communities form around - as you start to belong somewhere, that share relevent information on “the real thing”. It also allows people to become “important” b/c of their knowledge - and thus self-amplifying.
Agreed! They’re neat to look at for a few minutes, but then nothing changes, and I’m certainly not motivated to buy and set up a model train of my own.
Much of it could be that most women don’t like the way they look in those stripey engineer hats.
And, aside from the “just” part, this is why I love machines, because they are a product of our minds. When you understand how a machine works, you understand the choices another person made in designing it, however long ago or far away they were when they were building it. It’s close to telepathy.
I once had to build a cheap rack to fit the back of my pickup truck for a one-time moving job, so I decided to use some of the scrap lumber I’d accumulated from various projects. In deciding which dimensions of lumber to use for each part, I discovered that the cross pieces I used at the top of the rack perfectly aligned with the inside edge of the bed of the truck. Someone, at some point in designing that truck, had gone through the same thought process as me: “If I had to build a quick, cheap rack with easily available materials, what would I use?”, and then he built the truck to work with those choices. In that moment, I honored their memory, thinking, “Damn, nice job, truck guy!”
this is a cool insight.
I’m not a woman, but I have always enjoyed model railways. I only recently figured out what it is about them that I like, and it’s something that I think can definitely translate to anybody, so from that point of view I am uncertain why there are so few women interested in them.
I like to recreate reality. I do it when I render in 3D, I follow a lot of YouTubers who make props or dioramas, I am fascinated with exploring environments inside video games. And I am not very good at model kits, my dexterity fails me, so never got into them, though they tend towards being display models, rather than having a full scenario. Model trains, however, do have the full environment as part of their whole thing, so that’s why I like them. Not because they are trains, but because of the entire display of recreating reality in miniature.
And that’s why I think it surprising women aren’t into model trains, because making models and miniatures and environments are a common thing for any artist to create, whoever they are, so why not gravitate towards a railway diorama as a way to do that with some purpose? It’s kind of weird.
I love dioramas. And terraria and aquaria that are little worlds, not just boxes to keep animals in. The part I don’t like about model trains is the trains. The rest of it is cool.
My granddaughters liked real trains, but they went through a phase where they really liked garbage trucks. I got them a toy one that could dump bins and everything. It was a big hit. Their mother would have shot me if I’d given them something that had to take up permanent space in the house, the way a train installation does. She still would.
If I start to do models when I retire, it will be a model wastewater (formerly sewage) treatment plant. Thinking about it, I don’t know why more people aren’t interested in that.
Did you know that when environmental (or civil) engineers model wastewater treatment processes, they use molasses to represent the input and then test the outflow to find the efficiency of the process? That was a graduate class, so I never got to take it.
I don’t know if I’m atypical here, but I basically grew up in various fairly well-off outer suburbs of some American cities, and real life trains barely existed in my life. There were no tracks within sound or sight of me or the places I went to. As far as I knew, everyone’s parents commuted to work via private autos, and the mother’s had a second car to get them and their kids around. I was vaguely aware from tv shows and such that trains hauled big loads of stuff? but what I saw were deliveries by trucks to grocery stores and the like.
Boston has a subway, sure, but there’s nothing romantic about that. It was dirty and crowded on the very few occasions I traveled by it. Not even sights to see.
I DO remember that when we went on road trips, we children dreaded railroad tracks. You see, we would compete with counting all the animals we saw, and if you crossed a train track you go back to zero. 
I have no memory of us ever seeing a train on the move, or having to stop and watch a train pass in front of us.
Trains played just about as big a role in my life as teams of oxen pulling wagons.
Why would I have any nostalgic interest in trains?