Mike Flick doesn't remember it, but his mother told him when he was a little boy growing up in the small village of Elida, Ohio, that she used to set him down for hours in front of a model-train set ...

Jeff Jamison still has the first model train engine he received when he was 6 or 7. "It was a little Tyco diesel engine," he said, that his father gave him. Like most model-railroading hobbyists, ...