A Boy and His Trains

It was a good day.

I’ve been in love with trains since I was a little boy. So as our family shopped for our youngest’s birthday, I secretly thanked God more than once that my little already shared my passion.

To celebrate another year of his life, we took our son to the Richmond Train Museum down on Hull Street. They have a huge model train room, a lot of really cool exhibits, and a caboose you can climb aboard. And about halfway through our tour, a touching moment occurred when an older gentleman, in the midst of carefully preserving old slides of train pictures, informed us that it was his birthday, too. Then he gave our son a collector’s pin from his cap full of various train pins. It goes quite nicely with our son’s rapidly growing collection of toy trains. Another tour guide gave him a train magazine, with a lot of great pictures of both classic and modern locomotives.

While all of these moments are precious, the most precious of them all is watching the amazement in his eyes as he watched all of the trains circling the tracks in the model train room. You could almost see the seeds of imagination taking root.

Hours later, we put together his toy train set (which was surprisingly – delightfully – complex), and then sat with him for quite a while as he watched the trains go around and around.

Boys and their trains.