- November 27, 2024
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From the street, you’d never know it was a train station.
Rick Sabol clomps up the stairs of his Grand Haven home and stops at an entire world he made by hand, filled with mini lampposts and trees and train cars with silhouettes inside. It’s nailed into a table half the length of the wall, and Sabol said he’d make it bigger, if only “the boss” (his wife, Sherry) hadn’t put the kibosh on it.
“The sound is just incredible,” he says, flipping on one of five transformers. And then lights begin to flash. Smoke billows. Tracks start clicking.
It even smells like diesel.
“Everything is wired from the bottom up,” he says, his voice raised over the growing noise of the railways.
Pointing to tiny numbers printed on their sides, telling when each train was built, Sabol says he’s been a collector forever, from the first train he ever got from his father, on his first birthday in the 1940s.
That one’s probably worth about $10,000 now, he says.
When he was younger, he used to hang out at train stations. “We’d just sit on the platform, have a beer and watch them fly by at 100 miles an hour, and we used to wonder what’s on board,” he says.
Ask him how big his entire rig is, though, and his wife will joke “Too big!” as she leaves the room. But by then, he won’t seem to hear her.
“I think I have dust on the tracks,” he’ll say instead, rushing over to a modern-looking bullet train and sliding his finger along its metal track. Then he’ll squeeze drips of liquid smoke from a dropper and into an old steel railer.
By now, all eight trains are running full speed and the noise is all-consuming. And Sabol is lost somewhere inside of it, moving levers, breathing in the smell of smoke.
It’s only him up there, conducting a cloud of noise over the rest of Grand Haven. He controls a blur of streaks and rumbles. He leads it toward somewhere else.
