My maternal grandfather was a pipe fitter on the railroad, before becoming a defense contractor, and also before contracting mesothelioma and dying when I was 6.
He owned a sizable property in California which included a large home and some attached apartments. They ran a boarding-house for immigrants, and later, my widowed grandmother became a landlady.
I was raised with a fervent love for railroads of all types. I had little engineer togs as a toddler and a professional photoshoot to prove it. We rode around on a scale railroad in the park. But most of all, my grandfather's labor of love was building a model train set for me in an upstairs bedroom.
It was essentially a simple affair; grandpa had built a large plywood table topped with Astroturf. The rails themselves were in a large figure-eight, with not much landscaping or scenery around. We concentrated on the technical bits: a good AC/DC transformer with variable knob, some nice rolling stock with the traditional freight-train assortment of cars, and a locomotive that had that smokestack where you could insert a little tablet and it'd puff out "steam" while it ran.
My sister and I loved that whole setup, and it was like catnip to us in our youth, at least until the Atari 2600 took over. The railroad remained the centerpiece of that room and a focal point of our entertainment for years and years, even after grandpa passed away. It was really a cool thing for an authentic railroad guy to pass that on to his grandchildren.