Model train town becomes an obsession for commissioner
There is one fact Highlands resident Brian Stiehler wants to make perfectly clear.
This is not a Christmas village.
“This has nothing to do with Christmas, though a lot of people think it does,” said the Highlands Commissioner and Golf Course Superintendent at Highlands Country Club. “This has been something I’ve been doing since I was a kid.”
Stiehler did say he got his first Lionel train set for Christmas when he was three or four-years-old, and once upon a time, it may have been a Christmas village since every December, his dad would assemble the oval train track and arrange the assortment of houses on a sheet of plywood underneath the Christmas tree.
“It started out as a Christmas village, but took on a life of its own after I grew up,” he said.
Recently, he has been posting different photos of his town on Facebook, so that could be the source of the confusion.
“This has become something of an obsession over the years,” he said.
Stiehler passed ‘Christmas village’ a long, long time ago.
His town is also called Highlands, though it bears no resemblance to this one, other than a family of black bears strolling along a mountain meadow.
Stiehler’s train town fills nearly all of his basement, with his workshop nook and supply shelves, along with the approximately, 12-foot long, L-shaped table leaving barely enough room for a washer and dryer.
For Stiehler, this is all about numbers and the most important numbers to remember are one and 87. In train-speak it is called the H/O gauge.
“One foot on my table equals 87 feet in real life,” he said. “Everything size wise is to scale, but what not is to scale is 100 cars on my layout but only 20 parking spots.”
Stiehler’s attention to detail in his town is off the charts.
“This has become something of a sickness with me,” he said. “The trains are a key component of it and I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for the train… I started with the train. That was the fun part for me, but then as I got into it, something clicked. I got so interested into scaling stuff down. I don’t know why that fascinates me, but it does.”
The shift from trains to the town happened about five years ago when he sorted through the boxes his parents had saved from his childhood, and a box labeled Brian’s Trains.
“I thought about getting everything out and setting it up on plywood and set what I had up on a pair of sawhorses and it was like ‘Holy cow,’ it just clicked.”
Businesses are places he visited as a family as a child, or heroes in golf like Bobby Jones. There is a house with his father John on the roof, and a representation of Stiehler holding the ladder. His mom, Debbie is hanging laundry.
“A lot of what I do are inside jokes,” he said. “There are a lot of running jokes in my family growing up, from places we visited or people we knew.”
There is the World’s Largest Boiled Peanut on display, a throwback to Stiehler’s childhood.
There are bears walking along the railroad track and people out feeding them, a nod to Highlands becoming a BearWise town.
His town, is something he could get lost in, and Stiehler is aware of this.
“You could stay there for more than two hours and see different things going on that you missed the first time,” he said. “And that’s the way I like it. I like having a lot of different things going on. It’s like one giant memory of my childhood.”
It’s fun, Stiehler said.
There is some paving of paradise going on as the farm featured in his town is about to fall prey to urban development.
“The farm is going to go away for the most part,” he said. “I’m going to put some another little aspect of the town in there. I’m limited on space and it can’t get any bigger.”
His town is always evolving as over the years Stiehler had gotten better at building, painting and the little details he doesn’t like to overlook.
“I can get carried away,” he said.
Brian doesn’t have a golf course in his town.
Too big, he said, as it would have to be properly scaled. But if he did, you can bet it would have real grass.