Mississauga Ontario - It started out as a Christmas gift, an attempt by Mississauga resident Norman Fielding to keep his grandchildren occupied enough while they visited him to stay off their iPad or smartphone screens.
 
Never did he imagine it would turn into what it has become.
 
Yes, Fielding admitted during a recent visit by the Journal Argus to his basement shrine to St. Marys railroading history, it did turn into something that he occasionally feels compelled to keep secret from his wife.
 
It does, after all, sometimes lead to him spend more money on seemingly frivolous items than he ever would have done a few years ago, and certainly than he ever has done since moving to Canada in 1971 from his native Scotland.
 
But that's a minor point.
 
What he truly didn't envision is that he himself, not his grandchildren, would be the one who would become so hooked on the allure of model railroading that he would gradually transform his basement into this surprising scale-model interpretation of the town to which he first took up employment when arriving here 45 years ago.
 
"My first job was at Paul Mueller Canada, in the building that now has the Canadian Tire store in it," the still-hardworking draftsman explained.
 
He gestures towards the or HO (or "half O") gauge tracks that, stretching out along platforms attached to the walls, encircle the room.
 
As the eye travels from what is obviously the St. Marys Cement Company, towards what is obviously downtown St. Marys, anchored by the Great Star Flour Mill rising above the Thames River next to the still-existing Opera House, a short spur curves of what was, at that time, the CPR railway between Woodstock and St. Marys.
 
That spur crosses Water Street and runs directly into a scale-model version of the Paul Mueller workshop.
 
Paul Mueller was formerly Mueller-Richardson, before that, it was Charles Richardson and Sons, and even earlier the Richardson and Webster Foundry.
 
"When Paul Mueller pulled out, the factory was taken over by Instalfab, and I they kept me on there," Fielding relates.
 
"But then Instalfab started having financial troubles and they pulled up the spur because they didn't want to pay for it."
 
Fielding only came very late in life to his obsession with model railroading.
 
It has been only a short five years or so during which he has constructed his below-ground-level reconstruction.
 
But he has always been an enthusiast of real-life railroads.
 
"And taking out the spur was a big mistake, in my mind," he laments.
 
The writing was certainly on the wall already for the CPR line, though, with our without the Hall-Mueller spur.
 
The line and just about any of the structures which hint at its existence, save perhaps, the underpass beneath the Goderich and Exeter Railway tracks near Ulch Trucking, used by the Town-maintained walking path (which is, of course, depicted in Fielding's model), are now gone.
 
Not so, though, in this ode to early 1970s trains in the Stonetown.
 
"I never had a model railway as a child," Fielding smiles.
 
"So then when I got one, I kind of went overboard."
 
Interestingly, Fielding never actually resided in St. Marys.
 
He lived in London, then Stratford, commuting to jobs mostly in the same building, under a succession of owners until if finally closed.
 
Then he took up employment with Thames Label and Litho for a time.
 
Having moved to Mississauga in 1985, he still does some work in this part of the province.
 
And he most certainly still comes here to have his eyes checked by long-time friend Dr. Bruce Andrews.
 
It was Andrews who first piqued Fielding's interest in model railroading, and Andrews who alerted the Journal Argus to the existence of his 1970s-era shrine.
 
Fielding readily admits it has become an obsession.
 
It's not so much the railroading element itself, but rather a strong desire to recreate the St. Marys he came to know so well when he arrived from Scotland back in 1971.
 
Pointing towards his depiction of the storefronts along Water Street South (remember The Pewter Shop?), he says he would love to get hold of some accurate photos of what was then the Canadian Tire storefront (now the Salvation Army Thrift Shop).
 
Instead of the generic merchandise that can be seen through the window, he wants it to look exactly as it did.
 
It's a big rectangle of a room.
 
St. Marys is not a big rectangle.
 
So it's not exactly as it was, or is.
 
You have to use your imagination a little bit to envision how three railways, the CPR, the Grand Trunk, (think the Sarnia Bridge trestle) and the CNR (now owned by Goderich and Exeter Railway), converged in this peaceful valley.
 
Some things, you don't have to imagine.
 
Fielding has laid them right out there for you, exactly as they were.
 
"Look at the way the rock is formed by the current of the river along the Thames (below Victoria Bridge)," he comments.
 
"That's exactly how the rocks are curved. I used satellite photos to make sure it's exactly the same."
 
And on the Park Street Bridge?
 
Apparently, Fielding was not just an enthusiast of train travel.
 
He also got a kick out of canoe travel, as in the once regionally-famous "Bunny Bundle" canoe race on Easter weekend that saw hundreds of paddlers set off from St. Marys en route to the Fanshawe dam.
 
If you've reached a certain level of ocular degradation, you might need a magnifying glass, but there, clearly attached to the bridge, is a banner urging good luck for participants in the Bunny Bundle!
 
"Everything seems to take forever when you get started on a new piece of it," he laughs.
 
"And then the trouble is, you sometimes can't keep doing it because you also have to go out and work for a living!"
 
Strategically-taken photographs, attached to the wall behind the scale model, provide backdrops around parts of the room.
 
He'll continue to fill that space as well.
 
From St. Marys, the railway stretches through Belton (there are plans to recreate the Agro-Mart fertilizer facility that still utilizes the railway in Belton) and on into London.
 
Recently, he was able to climb to the top of a building south of downtown and capture images that will fit well in the small London section of his model.
 
"It seems like you could spend as much money, and as much time, as you think possible on these things, and you'll never be satisfied," muses a man who, clearly, seems to have resigned to his late-in-life-arriving fate of a perpetual model train tinkerer.
 
Stew Slater.