Well, there's the nostalgia factor, of course, and I've written at length about that in other posts.
But speaking solely for the present, I see my trains as a kind of time machine, allowing me to create a window of sorts into another world, one in which railroading was all-pervasive. I was born into the very tail end of that era, and with my own trains, I try to experience it as it was when it was in full power.
