I’ve never been to an actual model railroad operating session other than watching club layouts during visiting hours and my own home layout activities with my kids. I am so grateful for the effort that folks have put into sharing their sessions on DVD and YouTube, especially Joe Fugate and Charlie Comstock, and for the published guidance from writers like Tony Koester. I’m hoping my naivete works to my advantage somehow as I adapt what I’ve gleaned to the special case of a classroom full of eager, chatty kids.

Breaking down the operation of the ultimate in simple layouts, the bare Inglenook, into as many separate tasks as practical worked well. I actually defined eight discrete jobs so working in shifts allowed everyone to participate quickly, and each job was clear enough that most students could master their’s quickly and feel a sense of accomplishment, while observing each of the other jobs intimately enough to understand them all. The key job, conductor, is the only one with executive responsibility. The conductor’s job is, simply, give the orders.

Other than the Inglenook game objective (replicate the random train consist and sequence determined by dealing out five cards) I really only had to teach three things, the rest the kids could discover themselves by doing:

1.       How to couple (gently) and uncouple cars (get slack, insert toothpick, twist).

2.       No Hand of God except when uncoupling.

3.       The engine control options are move forward, move backward, and stop, and it’ll take a little practice to get the feel of acceleration and braking.

I left it to the organic ecosystem of youth to fashion a suitable system of communication, so naturally the conductor’s major task was dealing with a lot of advice. My students work together well, beautifully even, and it’s a lot of fun to stand back and watch them while they learn.

Naturally I’d spent some time running the Inglenook puzzle at home after I built it, so I knew that most of the possible arrangements were likely to be too tricky for a group of beginners to solve in the amount of time I could fit into a single class session. But they had no idea so the process of discovering the subtle challenges was unimpeded, kind of like the first time you tried to put a Rubik’s Cube back in order.

After everyone had some hands-on experience and understood exactly what to do and how to do it, the Inglenook has become a great filler activity that can be run by any number of kids, for any length of time. I call this kind of activity “mathy timespackle.” I got hats (kids love to dress up) to formalize the engineer and conductor roles, but sometimes individual kids enjoy running it on their own.

The student’s reaction to the Inglenook convinced me that the model railroad-as-learning tool would appeal to these kids. A lot. So I began to ask them why they thought one end of the track had those little bumpers at the end, but the switch lead had a temporary black pushpin instead. Hmm?

Jeff