“The biggest problem I had when I retired was not having anything to do,” Michael Sutton recalls when he ended a career as a senior network engineer with the prestigious downtown D.C. law firm Covington & Burling.
Fortunately, he quickly found something he could throw himself into: building a model-train layout that now fills the basement rec room of his townhouse off Van Dusen Road. “And this is only half done in my mind,” he says, two years later.
His passion wasn’t foreseeable. He says he was intrigued hearing trains pass nearby as he grew up in the projects of Baltimore, and he enjoyed traveling on them during European business trips. He even had a simple oval setup as a child, though he didn’t spend much time with it.
But just before he retired, an enthusiast friend who was moving to Florida offered to sell Sutton his 4-by-8-foot model-train layout. Sutton assumed the layout was worth about $5,000. The friend asked for $200. Sutton, being a nice guy, gave him $400.
While setting up the layout in the basement, “I realized that most of the stuff he had given me didn’t work,” Sutton says. So he began to spend time — like 12 hours a day — learning to fix engines, wire electronics and install sensors. He also bought 100 sets of metal wheels and replaced the cars’ plastic ones so that he could get an authentic “clack, clack” sound when the train ran.
After his employer gave him $700 worth of model buildings and lights as a retirement gift, he tore down his friend’s design and rebuilt an 8-by-12-foot layout.
The buildings create a small town, like Laurel, through which the tracks run. There are houses, a police station, a fire station, a post office, a church, a movie theater, a hospital and, of course, a train depot similar to Laurel’s. He installed lights in all the buildings, as well as streetlights.
Sutton wants the layout to be even more like Laurel, which has been his home for 45 years. He plans to create a facsimile Main Street, and also a second level in the center of his layout to add more tracks and more buildings.
His current layout is enough to dazzle family and friends. Even Mayor Keith Sydnor calls Sutton “the train guy” after knocking on Sutton’s door during his campaign and being lured into the basement.
Sutton says he has cut down his train time to about four hours a week of tweaking and fine-tuning, plus two hours of actually running his trains and enjoying his lights.
“Doing this is not inexpensive,” he said. “You spend a lot of money. You have a lot of fun. I love it.”