Some tinplaters don’t worry much about setting, but I want to capture something: An area of south St. Louis that’s always been special to me.

In the 1980s, we would drive into the Gravois/Hampton area of St. Louis for special occasions. In particular, there was a shop on Loughborough where Dad and I bought baseball cards (long ago closed), and an Italian restaurant on Hampton called Del Pietro’s where we would eat. The early 20th century architecture of the houses and shops always captivated me, having always lived in settings that reflected a postwar suburbia, prefab style.

When I moved to St. Louis, I settled a few miles from that area. I settled in the suburbs, where the schools tend to be better, but a lot of friends lived in that area, and a lot of my favorite hangouts were in or around there.

Some fifteen years later, I met my future wife. She lived in that area.

The timeframe is a compromise. I love 1920s and 1930s trains but can’t afford a lot of them. I also wanted to be able to run Dad’s postwar Lionels, because they remind me of him. I finally settled on setting my layout in the 1940s, because I can run Dad’s postwar Lionel steamers in that setting without them looking out of place (some of his trains date to 1949 or so), and the magnificent Marx tinplate Santa Fe diesel looks fine in it too. Yet I can also run trains from much earlier in the century without them looking too far out of place.

And yet, by taking a more timeless approach, I can even put modern-looking buildings on the layout temporarily without it looking too odd. After all, New Urbanism is all the rage today. What’s old is new again.

Since a hobby is supposed to be an escape, I wanted my layout to resemble a time and place that I like, and that probably doesn’t really exist anymore.

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