Making Tracks to Recapture Youth : Hobbies: Model train show rekindles some sweet memories. But one thing that’s changed since many enthusiasts’ childhood days is the pastime’s cost.

Bill Irizarry wore his blue engineer’s cap most of Sunday.

Staring intently ahead, he pulled a lever here and pushed a button there. As a result, several electric train engines went clicking around a large circular track belching smoke and emitting long, shrill whistles.

“I got my first train set at the age of 8 and still have it,” said Irizarry, a 39-year-old maintenance mechanic from La Habra. “I like them because they’re always going places; it appeals to the hobo in all of us.”

Irizarry, member of a club called Orange County Tin Plate Trackers, was one of the more than 100 exhibitors, vendors and collectors who set up shop at the Orange County Fairgrounds on Sunday for the Great Pacific Train Show.

There were electric train sets galore, as well as tracks, trestles and tunnels. One vendor dealt only in miniature buildings, while another stocked such accessories as tiny lampposts sporting real lights and small bulldozers that work. Still another booth featured lamps made from model trains and a fourth displayed old railroad-style vest watches.

While most of the stuff was for sale, some of it was just for show.

“The idea is to introduce people to model railroading and help them get hard-to-find items,” said Bob Olson, the show’s manager, who is employed by a Chicago-based company that organizes about 60 such shows a year, including six in Orange County. “People are fascinated by trains because they are part of U.S. history.”

Many of the estimated 3,000 people who paid the $5 admission fee, in fact, seemed attracted by the idea of creating and occupying their own miniaturized cities. “It’s a way of getting away from the world,” Irizarry said. “If I’ve had a hard day at work, I come home and run the train layout for a couple of hours instead of yelling at the kids.”

Like him, many visitors said they saw model railroading as a way of retaining or recapturing the excitement of their youths.

“I’ve always loved toys,” admitted Don Ward, 49, of Huntington Beach. “Now my kids are gone, so I can start playing with them again.”

Two years ago when his daughter turned 21, Ward said, he treated himself to a modest Lionel train set to be run around the Christmas tree. But it reminded him so much of the one he’d had as a boy, he said, that he just kept adding to it until today “it’s crowded me out of the entire living room--it’s started to strangle me.”

Ward said he has spent close to $2,000 in a seemingly endless quest to re-create the set of his youth. “It just kind of consumes you,” he said of his hobby.

Indeed, one of the most striking changes in model railroading since the 1950s, when many of its current enthusiasts were children, is the spiraling cost of the hobby. Back then, enthusiasts say, almost any average American family could afford to surprise one of its younger members with a modest train set. Such sets are still available, they say. But items on sale at Sunday’s show included an all-brass engine and tender for $900 and a brand new Lionel Blue Comet engine and cars described by its owner as a virtual steal for $1,995.

“Most people just display them,” explained Paul N. Conner, a certified public accountant from San Diego and proud owner of the Blue Comet. “They don’t run them because they don’t want to scratch them.”

Said Frank Witczak, 40, of Torrance, a chemical plant operator whose father gave him his first train set on the day he was born: “It’s not a kid’s hobby anymore. It’s been taken over by big guys.”