Model Train Show Brings Out the Kid in Adults : Hobbies: Enthusiasts relish the miniature worlds they build around their intricately detailed and often expensive toys.

VENTURA —  By day, Arnold Arons is just your average manufacturer of leather goods.

But when he gets home from work, Arons is lord of all that he surveys, king of the world. He makes the weather. He builds the homes. And, perhaps most important, he makes the trains run on time.

“You can have anything you want,” said the Burbank resident, surrounded by a miniature train chugging along an oval track, narrowly missing a tornado made of cotton puffs. “It’s your own slice of the universe.”

It was a slice of life sampled by hundreds of vendors and train enthusiasts at the Great American Train Show, which tours nationwide and pulled into Ventura’s Seaside Park during the weekend.

Ask these men--and they’re by far mostly men--why they like model trains so much, and they provide a very simple answer: They just do.

It reminds some of their youths--the toy train rolling around the Christmas tree or the steam engine that chugged past a childhood home.

“It’s about the kid in us,” said Ron Owens, a retired Ventura resident and member of the Del Oro Pacific model train club. “Now we’re old enough that we have the time and money to play.”

The club’s hefty miniature train layout, with its complex maze of tracks, took four hours to set up at Seaside Park, Owens said, and drew a constant stream of wide-eyed train fans, both adults and kids.

Tony Eastland found his two tykes to be bigger train fans than he ever was. William, 4, and Cameron, 3, were excited bundles of energy, as they climbed on their dad for a better look at a smokestack on one of the club’s locomotives.

“I like watching the tunnel, because the train goes through it,” said William.

Trains varied in size--from some so small that they could fit in the palm of your hand--to others with cars the size of a loaf of bread. The 95 cars on Arons’ model train would be more than a mile in length if they were actual size. The linked cars cost Arons about $1,000, which in the world of train hobbyists isn’t considered to be a particularly noteworthy expenditure.

“People could spend everything they make,” said Jim Andrews of San Diego, who carted in boxes of miniature train cars and tracks to sell. “Some can get obsessed.”

Andrews spends about half his time working with the models, selling at train fairs or detailing the tiny trains. Like Arons, he surmises that the allure of toy trains is their suggestion of a smaller, more malleable world.

“I don’t know anything about psychology,” he said. “But it must be about creating your own little empire. You’re in control.”

Schuyler King’s toy train, which he sets up in his yard each Christmas, becomes the talk of his Simi Valley neighborhood. King wore a blue engineer’s cap at the show and claimed not to be much of a train aficionado compared with some of the other enthusiasts, but he also said he and his wife, Mary, often structure their vacations around taking train trips. And, the train scene in his yard grows larger with each passing year.

“People come by from all over to look,” said Mary King. “People pass it on to their friends.”

The hope of many of the participants--most pushing well into middle age--is that children will like the model trains so much that one day they’ll keep the tradition going.

“Trains built America,” said Schuyler King. “This is about history.”