For years, educators have preached the importance of STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Don Fisher thinks they’re missing a letter.

Sitting in a dusty, second-floor conference room above the Lionel Visitor Center at the Railroad Museum of Long Island in Riverhead last month, president Don Fisher made a case for STEAM instead. The “A” is for art.

“In model railroading, you get the science, the technology, the engineering and the mathematics,” Fisher said. “But you also get the art. Today, it’s too easy for us to get lost in our screens,” he said. “We’re not using our hands. We’re not using our minds and our imagination.”

He’s talking about what happens every Tuesday, when the museum is closed, the visitors are gone and the trains come apart.

By 9 a.m. on a recent Tuesday, the Lionel Visitor Center felt like a machine shop. Locomotives sat upside down on workbenches, their shells removed to expose tiny motors, gears and wiring. Plastic organizers filled with screws, springs and replacement brushes lay on a bench. Somebody was vacuuming the floor surrounding the layout. Another volunteer was polishing rails.

The Tuesday team is a colorful mix of tinkerers. One works on prewar standard-gauge trains. Another specializes in electronics. Someone else rebuilds accessories. Others rotate locomotives on and off the layout, keeping detailed records of what has been serviced, what still needs attention and which engines are ready for another weekend.

Fisher smiles when people call them train enthusiasts.

“They’re problem solvers,” he said.

‘A good group of people’

Brandon Murphy never expected this to become his retirement. The Noyack resident first visited the museum shortly after the Lionel Visitor Center opened in 2009. Like thousands of visitors since, he was captivated by the sprawling layout, originally built by Lionel as a showcase for its products. Years later, after retiring, another museum member suggested he stop by on a Tuesday.

“It’ll be a good group of people,” Murphy remembers being told.

His first assignment wasn’t glamorous. He cleaned track. One Tuesday, someone placed a broken locomotive on the bench beside him. Murphy looked it over.

“They said, ‘Can you fix it?’ I said ‘yes. I got the parts at home.'”

Today, nearly every locomotive that runs through the museum on a weekend eventually finds its way to Murphy’s workbench. If an engine begins smoking, stalls unexpectedly or just doesn’t sound right, volunteers leave a note beside it.

By Tuesday morning, Murphy starts taking it apart. During the winter, when the museum closes to visitors, he works methodically through the collection, cleaning bearings, lubricating drivetrains, inspecting wiring and documenting every repair until roughly 70 locomotives are ready for another season.

“The old stuff,” he said, “usually comes back.”

‘Can you get the parts?’

The oldest trains on the layout—many built more than 70 years ago—are often easier to repair than locomotives manufactured in the last decade. Postwar Lionel trains were produced in enormous numbers. Springs, brushes, gears and motors are still available through specialty dealers, online collectors and sprawling train shows, particularly the twice-yearly Train Collectors Association’s York Train Fair in York, Pa., where museum volunteers wander table after table searching for parts they may not need today but eventually will.

Modern locomotives, by contrast, rely on sophisticated electronics. Once manufacturers stop producing circuit boards, even experienced technicians can find themselves with no way to repair a locomotive worth well over $1,000.

“You can learn how to fix them,” Murphy said. “The question is, can you get the parts?”

How much knowledge disappears when people stop fixing things? Fisher has spent years thinking about that question. He doesn’t believe model railroading survives because people are nostalgic, but because human beings still enjoy making things.

“When I see these guys putting stuff together and figuring the engineering to build whatever it is we need – it is an art, and with the railroading, you get the art of the design of your train layout.”

‘A wealth of experience and knowledge’

Austin Houck stands out among the museum’s volunteers. At 24, he’s decades younger than many of the people restoring locomotives and maintaining the layout, and he doesn’t buy the idea that people his age aren’t interested in working with their hands.

“I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true,” he said. “I think a lot of people who are my age who are interested in trains love everything about it. They love the mechanics of it. They love designing layouts, doing decoration.”

Houck’s path to the museum began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like millions of people confined to home, he found himself revisiting pieces of childhood. For him, that meant Thomas the Tank Engine. That rediscovered fascination led to his first HO-scale train set, then visits to hobby shops, and eventually a summer trip to the Railroad Museum of Long Island.

“I came here on a summer’s day,” he said. “Right then and there, I joined the membership.”

He started where almost everyone starts – cleaning track. It isn’t glamorous work, but Fisher says that’s the point. Before volunteers learn to repair locomotives, they learn the railroad itself. Walking every inch of the layout teaches them where the hidden track lies, how the accessories operate and where derailments could happen. From there, people naturally drift toward whatever captures their interest.

For Houck, it was repairs. While Murphy concentrates largely on postwar locomotives, Houck often tackles newer equipment and electronic diagnostics. When he runs into something he doesn’t know, there’s usually someone sitting a few feet away who has spent decades solving similar problems.

“You know, we have such a wealth of experience and knowledge here,” he said. “You find that thing you like.”

Every weekend, families stream through the museum, and Fisher can usually tell which children have been hooked. Some take a quick look at the layout and leave. Others can’t seem to pull themselves away.

“They’ll come with their parents or grandparents, and you can tell which ones are really interested.”

Those children often come back, and some eventually become members.

New members learn to greet visitors. They become conductors on the museum’s restored 16-inch-gauge train that once carried passengers around the Long Island Rail Road pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. Others gravitate toward restoring railroad equipment. A dedicated few land in the Tuesday workshop.

Ongoing changes

The museum’s centerpiece — the Lionel Visitor Center layout — recreates Lionel’s famous 1949 showroom layout, built in Lower Manhattan as both a holiday attraction and a marketing showcase where toy retailers could see the company’s newest products. Every few years, Lionel replaced the layout with a new design reflecting its latest offerings.

When the company later relocated to Michigan, employees built a visitor center around a recreation of the historic display, working on it during lunch breaks and after hours because the company wouldn’t pay for the project itself. Years later, when that visitor center closed, volunteers from the Railroad Museum of Long Island rented a tractor-trailer, drove to Mt. Clemens, Michigan, dismantled the layout section by section and hauled it back to Riverhead, where they spent years reconstructing it. It would have been easy to preserve it exactly as it was, but instead, they keep changing it.

Every winter, over lunches and cups of coffee on Tuesday mornings, the volunteers decide what should be different when the museum reopens in the spring. A bridge appears where there wasn’t one before. A mountain becomes a gorge. An industrial waterfront gives way to a three-ring circus. Eagle-eyed visitors immediately begin searching for what’s new. The layout evolves because the people caring for it do – which is what Fisher believes keeps the museum alive.