Memorable moments: Parallel tracks

Dad was extraordinarily mechanical—so much so that he carried a quiet, lifelong regret about choosing dentistry over engineering.

Around the house, he was endlessly handy, keeping household appliances humming and personally servicing the engines of his red Beetle and mustard Variant with consummate ease. But his true mechanical genius reached its zenith in his backyard workshop. Amidst the sharp tang of machine oil, turning lathes, and racks of precision drill bits, Dad pursued his greatest passion: engineering miniature, fully functional, coal-fired steam locomotives from scratch.

These weren't flimsy models; they were heavy, magnificent works of industrial art. Engineered to precise scale, a single locomotive took him years of patient milling to complete and possessed enough genuine boiler power to haul seven fully grown adults around a club track.

Naturally, Dad harbored a deep, unspoken hope that his son would inherit the mechanical torch.

Alas, genetics had other ideas. I simply did not inherit that gene. Years later, when I sat for a comprehensive career aptitude test, the results laid it out in cold, indisputable numbers: I scored comfortably above average in nearly every category, except mechanical reasoning—where I landed squarely in the bottom ten percent.

To Dad, who could read an engine diagram like a second language, my total ineptitude with tools occasionally brought him close to despair. He would look on with quiet disappointment as nuts, bolts, and spark plugs failed to ignite even a flicker of curiosity in me.

Thankfully, the mechanical gods sent an apprentice in the form of our close family friend, Julian. Julian was gifted with the exact engineering instinct I lacked. He and Dad bonded effortlessly over calipers, blueprints, and lathe chucks, forging a rich, shared passion. Dad happily mentored him through his projects, and Julian eventually went on to become a professional engineer.

Yet for all my aversion to spanners and gear teeth, I still carried a genuine fascination with the magic of trains, particularly steam locomotives.

I loved climbing aboard the carriages behind Dad’s hand-built engines as they chugged around the club circuit. I cherished the sensory joy of the open-air miniature railway on the Sea Point promenade—riding the little engine along the Atlantic shoreline, the salty breeze in our faces right after a visit to San Marco for ice cream.

The breakthrough moment arrived on an afternoon Dad drove me to a local hobby shop to pick out my very first Lima model train set.

Inside the shop, the gap between engineer and dreamer vanished. We stood before the glass display cases equally starry-eyed, buzzing with the exact same boyish excitement. He admired the scale accuracy and the motor design; I fell in love with the sheer poetry of the rolling stock.

Back home, I cleared space in the storeroom immediately adjacent to Dad's workshop and laid down an expansive electric track.

Over the years that followed, as I steadily built up a magnificent collection of carriages and engines, an easy harmony settled over that corner of the back yard behind the house. Through the adjoining doorway, Dad would spend long, contented hours turning brass and steel for his heavy steam engines, while I spent hours orchestrating schedules and watching my electric Lima train glide across the miniature rails.

I was never going to turn a brass cylinder on a lathe, but in those quiet afternoons beside the hum of the transformer, father and son were finally running on parallel tracks.