Locomotives sit on the rails ready to haul their heavy cargo.

Passenger cars wait at depots for their travelers to board.

And a red caboose races to keep up with its train as it flies past historic buildings, rumbles over bridges and whistles past a small village.

It sounds like a scene out of a little boy’s dream — but this dreamer is 81 years old.

Fourteen years ago when Dean McClurg retired, he found life to be just a little too quiet.

“I just can’t sit around and do nothing,” he says. “When I first retired ... I would sit and drink a cup of coffee and then go downtown and drink a cup of coffee and then come back home and drink a cup of coffee. And I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do this all my life. It’s ridiculous.’”

That’s when his wife, Maxine, remembered a small train set they had bought their son when he was just a toddler. The locomotive had been packed away in an attic box for the last 50 years, but Mrs. McClurg thought it may just the thing to keep her husband from ingesting too much java. So she pulled it out of mothballs and handed it to her spouse.

It was just what he was looking for.

Mr. McClurg now spends most of his day, every day, in the basement of his Weston, Mo., home tinkering with everything from crossing gates to freight cars and water towers. He spends hours laying rails, building displays and making repairs to his collection of locomotives — and most of the time his trains rumble around the tracks with an occasional whistle.

“He’s got about 10 of them down here,” Mrs. McClurg says. “Sometimes when I’m upstairs I can hear them all running,”

Most of the displays he has built himself. Using some pretty mean woodworking skills and any spare item he can find, he’s constructed mountains out of scrap lumber, turned potato chip cans into grain elevators and transformed toothpicks into white picket fences.

“I think he bought all the toothpicks the grocery store had,” his wife laughs.

Mr. McClurg’s eclectic workshop long ago outgrew its space. What started out in a spare room quickly turned into much more. He ended up punching a couple of holes in the wall to make a tunnel for his trains to travel into the main room. But even that’s not enough. Now he has his eyes set on the garage as the perfect spot to put his replica of Weston’s downtown. He tried to take it over once, but his wife had other ideas.

“He was getting the garage filled up and I said, ‘No, don’t put that in there. I’ve got to be able to get my car in there in the winter time.’ Then he asked if he could come upstairs.”

She lovingly put the kibosh on that as well, but one thing she won’t put a stop to is his love for trains.

“I’m so happy he does this because it gives him something to do and keeps his mind active, you know,” Mrs. McClurg admits. “But he needs a great big building to put all this in. It takes a lot of space.”

If she doesn’t watch it, she may have to find another place to park.

“I guess someday, if I ever get the time, I’ll have to find somewhere to put it or I’ll have to take over this whole basement — the car and all,” he grins.

Lifestyles reporter Tamara Clymer can be reached at tami.clymer@npgco.com.