PHOTOS BY RIMAS ZAILSKAS
As a boy, Bertil van Boer lived in a row house in Kumla, Sweden, right beside the train tracks. His childhood memories are filled with the thunderous rumbles and dish-rattling vibrations of the train passing by every ten minutes. Now 83, Bertil is living in a quiet home in Hendersonville, but still sees trains every day — in his basement. They are model trains, running on tiny tracks, through miniature towns beneath blue skies painted on the walls.
Diminutive pine trees, lakes and streams cover an undulating landscape. The scaled-down towns have a European flavor, with quaint cottages sitting near petite urban centers. Minuscule people the size of a fingernail stand frozen in time, presumably on their way to another part of the basement. The tracks travel around the perimeter of the large room and then circle back into the middle. With several control boxes to run different lines, Bertil can operate switches to deftly transfer trains from one track to another.
"I come down here as much as I can," he says. "As much as my wife will let me. It saves me from going to the beer parlor." Bertil is only joking about his wife and the beer parlor. He is serious about his trains, however.
A near miss with a locomotive spurred his lifelong captivation with railways. When he was four years old, Bertil slipped out of the house and went down to the tracks. He placed his ear on a rail and listened for the distant rhythms of wheels. Instead, he heard his mother screaming, then felt her scoop him up and drag him off the tracks. Twenty seconds later, the next train roared by. "It takes a long distance for the brakes to stop the train," he says. "It could have never stopped in time."
A panicked moment for his mother, but for Bertil, the experience was entrancing rather than traumatizing. The train that stopped near his school en route from a mine to the switch station where the trains turned around fascinated him. The boy managed to convince the engineer to let him climb aboard every day for the ride to the switch station and back, depositing him at his school before it returned to the quarry.
When Bertil was 13, his adventures took him further. He enlisted in the army. "I lied a little about my age," he concedes. One benefit of the Swedish army was his education at the Swedish Royal Academy in Stockholm. The city was home to a thriving model railroad club that owned a building the size of a city block where the public came to eat, socialize and watch the trains. The setup was so elaborate it required multiple operators, and Bertil quickly secured a spot as part of the team.
He has owned model trains ever since.
In his subterranean train room, scale models of mighty locomotives, cabooses, passenger cars, flat and boxcars are proudly displayed. Bertil can point to each train and discuss where he bought it, for how much and the characteristics of its real-life counterpart. Some of them have been ordered from catalogs, while others were found in various shops during his travels.
Bertil worked as a civil engineer for much of his life in Florida and California, and has always preferred to journey by rail, at home and abroad. Another of his passions, music, has allowed him to tour throughout Europe as a guest symphonic conductor.
On one recent solo trip overseas, he reconnected with an old flame. The train he was taking from Sweden to Berlin had loaded onto a train ferry, a giant barge that carries rail cars across the Baltic Sea. While returning to his car following a meal, he slipped and broke his arm. Two operations and one week later, he decided to visit Stuttgart, Germany, where his son was performing in an opera, to enjoy some family time and recover. The two were browsing a hobby shop when Bertil stumbled across a surprising find — a model of the first train on which he had ever traveled.
"I recognized it right away," he says. Of course, he added it to his collection. The cost of the vintage locomotive? Roughly $100 US currency. Holding a memory in the palm of your hand? Priceless.
