NEWRY, Maine — Howard Stevenson had a long and impressive career at Harvard University. He was a professor for 46 years, focusing on business and entrepreneurship. His work and wisdom are the subjects of a book called "Howard’s Gift," written by a student he mentored.
But it wasn’t his time in academia that made us want to pay him a visit.
Howard now splits his time between Newry, where Sunday River Ski Resort is located, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. When he is in Maine, he sheds his academic life and puts on his engineer hat.
"I grew up in a small house with a Christmas train. But a) there wasn’t room to put it out and leave it out, and b) my mother was a packrat. So when she died, I went to empty the house, and there were all my trains in virgin boxes," Howard recalled.
He brought those train cars and tracks back home. Eventually, with a little more time on his hands, he began pulling those train cars out of their boxes and experimenting with train sets and tracks. This rekindled his childhood love of trains, and his passion was back on track.
Howard remembers a specific train car that inspired the landscape that now takes up residence in its own room.
"I took my wife to the train store ... and she came back and said, 'I found the train I went to camp on,'" he said.
It turns out that particular car wouldn’t run on the track that Howard had already begun to build, so she suggested he build a new one.
"Like any good husband, I do what she says!" Howard said with a smile.
What Howard and his sons have built is not your typical train landscape.
"It wasn't planned," he said.
Planned or not, it has taken on enormous proportions. The layout started – and soon outgrew – Howard's garage. Painstakingly, with help from his sons and other model train fanatics, they moved the original parts to a room set aside to house the landscape and continued to expand.
Howard estimates the train tracks and surrounding settings now take up nearly 400 square feet.
It all gets built from materials like foam and plaster cloth, the stuff that’s used to mend a broken arm. Rocks are made from lightweight material and then hand painted. Trees and buildings are either made from scratch or purchased.
It has been a work in progress for about eight years.
Howard has built a tribute to his adopted state of Maine – a place he loves.
"That was the attempt," he said. "To say let’s give honor to each of the kinds of things that we’ve enjoyed in Maine. So seaside, camping, little villages, bigger towns."
The more you look, the more you see. Lighthouses that light up; blinking billboards; a gondola going up the mountainside; bikers parked at the diner; the harbor full of boats, all built by Howard.
"The tracks are really what determines the layout – and then you’re looking for ways to tell the story with the people in the buildings and the animals and that stuff," Howard said. "I decided to do the fall because I think that’s the most glorious time in Maine."
The fact that his kids and grandchildren delight in "the train room" almost as much as he does brings him great joy.
Eight trains can run at once, and as you gaze at the extraordinary detail of what is going on, you see a wedding in the chapel, a car wash across the street, people in the gazebo, pumpkins in the pumpkin patch, folks from the mill on their lunch break, and even tiny – individual – corn stalks in the field.
I asked Howard what compelled him to pour so much of his heart and soul into this effort.
"I’ve written a fair number of books, and this I view as a visual book. You’re telling a story. And so if you look around, you’ll see the people camping, see the deer hunters, see the people hiking – so it’s a way of telling a story that is very different than writing a book. But on the other hand, it’s very satisfying because at the end of the day you have something that’s tangible. Even if nobody sees it, you can walk down and say, 'Oh I need to fix this, or I want to change that. This morning I filled the dumpsters with trash!'"
Howard said the best place to buy train cars and tracks is on eBay because many parents cannot wait to get that stuff out of the house when their kids leave the nest.