Video: Shelter Islander’s holiday model train layout: so … is it for him or the kids?

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Bill Aston with his Christmas train layout.

Bill Aston may have retired in 1996 as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s vice president for engineering but every Christmas he’s back into railroading big time with a holiday twist.

His career put him in charge of everything from the first rehabilitation of Grand Central Station to stations, crossings, signal and power systems for the Harlem, Hudson and New Haven Divisions of what used to be the New York Central Railroad.

“They gave us $2 billion to refurbish tunnels, viaducts, power transmission and signal systems and new equipment,” he recalled of his first years on the job in the early 1980s.

He doesn’t need that kind of money to manage the transportation infrastructure he’s in charge of now.

Around Thanksgiving every year, he starts gathering all the parts of an elaborate holiday train layout he stores in bits and pieces around the house every January. He reassembles it under a big fresh-cut Christmas tree in the living room. Thirteen years in the works, it includes eight trains, about 90 lighted buildings, 140 feet of track, a couple hundred figures of people, elves and other characters, 40 reindeer, a dramatic ridge of snowy mountains carved from Styrofoam he found by the side of the road and a waving Santa who’s about to go airborne with his team and sleigh.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | The Reindeer Flight Training school.

There’s a Reindeer Flight Training School, an ice skating pond, an inn for elves and a main station where trains pull up to the voice of a conductor reminding passengers to take their bags and listing the next stops on the line.
Mr. Aston claims he does it all for the kids — a grown son and two daughters, seven grandchildren, ages 24 to 12, and one great-grandchild. But if you watch him comfortably kneeling on the rug, firing up his Long Island Railroad  “Atlantic” or G55 or DV1 locomotives or his New York Central “Hudson” engine, you might get the impression he’s as much of a kid as they are … or were.

“I just had to have every building they made,” he said of the “Department 56” brand of quaint miniature structures that fill the layout like a Liliputian village. That obsession entered his head after his daughter gave him the first structure in the set-up, a small station. It was meant to go with the now-antique Lionel set that Mr. Aston’s parents bought for their two boys around 1936, when Bill was an infant and his brother was 3.

Mr. Aston’s parents held onto that Lionel locomotive set after the boys grew up. They gave it to Bill when he and his wife Rose Marie began to raise a family soon after their marriage. The train went to Bill because his brother was a bachelor.

While the three Aston kids were growing up, it was just the Lionel set chugging around a simple track under the tree every year. The idea of a big Christmas-themed layout didn’t come to Mr. Aston until years later, after he’d retired and the couple had moved from Huntington full-time to their former summer house on the Peconic Avenue waterfront.

“The fateful day” when “it all started,” he said, came when a friend from Alabama came to visit the Astons with her young daughter. The two ladies went off shopping, leaving Bill with one bored little girl. “I had trouble communicating with her,” he said, until he showed her the old train set under the tree. At that time it had only a set of 10 miniature old-fashioned streetlights to go with it. As the Lionel motored around the track, “She just played with the lights,” he recalled, and seemed delighted.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Santas compete in the downhill.

Then his daughter gave him that station and he got even bigger ideas. “I liked it so much I knew I had to have all 70 pieces” made by Department 56, a gift seller with a line of festive miniature buildings. “I just had to have everything they made,” including buildings they stopped making long ago. He made contact with collectors and began buying.
When he went to a model railroaders’ show in Head of Harbor, he found even more inspiration — the time to expand his stock. “Off we went and my eyes were opened wide,” he remembered.

Before joining the MTA, Mr. Aston, a graduate of City College of New York with an engineering degree and of CCNY’s Baruch College with an M.B.A., spent years as a project manager, first as a commissioned officer with the Army for two years and then 10 years as a civilian employee with the Navy. The work took him and Rose Marie from Georgia to Iceland to Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. He planned the underwater sea lab at the submarine base in New London and for a time was in charge of planning for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It wasn’t until 1963 that the Navy based him in New York and they were able to settle down and buy a house in Huntington. Rose Marie, an artist, ran her own ceramics shop there until they moved to Shelter Island.

One has to wonder if all along during his engineering career he really had wanted to be the guy who sits in the locomotive with a hand on the throttle, not the guy deciding which ones to buy for the MTA.

“It’s strange,” he admitted. “When I went to interview for the job with Bill Ronan,” head of the MTA at the time, “the first thing out of my mouth was that I was a train hobbyist.” It wasn’t true at the time; all he had was the old childhood Lionel set.

His grandkids have loved the grand display — it’s part of the Christmas tradition for them — but Mr. Aston admitted, “It’s for me. We always say it’s for the kids but I get so much joy out of it, it’s more for us.”

PETER BOODY PHOTO | A model LIRR electric locomotive at the station.