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Comments (107)

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  gadders
  Maybe he had to keep it a secret?"A businessman who secretly built the UK’s biggest model railway feared his girlfriend would dump him if she learnt about his ‘dull’ hobby."Train-mad Simon George, 53, spent £250,000 and a staggering eight years on his 200ft-long project.https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/07/man-spent-250000-secretly-bui...
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  alnwlsn
  Reminds me of an estate sale I went to one time. Unassuming place, one of those tiny postwar homes about the same size as the one in this article - but with at least double or triple the density of this train layout in the basement. The owner must have been a very thin person, as the narrow winding paths around the basement in places measured no more than 8 inches, and the widest parts were only about 2 foot wide. In a 900 sq. foot basement, there was probably only about 50 sq foot of floor you could actually rest your feet on. The rest was all layout and boxes of trains and train accessories of all sorts - hundreds of tiny pots of specialty paint, miniature trees, "grass powder", special linkages and wheels, and more. Probably most of it got thrown away at the end of the sale.People have hobbies, but I can't think of any circumstance in which I'd convert my basement into a deathtrap. There was less room than those hoarder houses you see on TV (but much more organized). It was genuinely concerning that they even decided to hold a sale there open to the public.Truly one of the more bizarre things I've seen. Also, the upstairs? Mostly normal - you wouldn't even know the guy liked trains.
• gwbas1c
  When my daughter was 2, one day I saw a sign for a model train exhibit in a strip mall. We walked into a tiny-ish hobby shop, and were directed to a staircase in a corner.At the top was a huge warehouse filled with model trains, tracks, and landscapes. She was obsessed with the largest Thomas the Tank Engine set I've ever seen, and all I wanted to do was to look at all the different landscapes.
• rbanffy
  I'm not really into trains, but it would be great if one day I found a 1970's computer room in my basement, complete with cold water lines, 3278 and 3279 terminals, and some tape drives...I'd be happy to discover a basement, even if the first thing I'd do would be to call the police to check if nobody went missing near my neighborhood in the past few decades.
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  wrs
  This is fantastic. But wow, the home inspector was really phoning it in that day!
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  ByteDrifter
  Imagine buying a house and gaining not just a home, but someone else’s whole dream world beneath your feet. That’s more than real estate. That’s a time capsule.
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  brunker2
  How? It was accessible through a door. Nobody - not the seller, agent, himself or any other prospective buyers, or the building inspector he presumably engaged to check the place over before signing contracts - thought to look behind the door?How can you buy a house without checking out the foundations/basement yourself or by a pro?
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  qtwhat
  model train network?! a network to train your large language model?
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  darkoob12
  Funny some AI words are in the title and these days you expect every post on HN be related to AI.model train network
• freeopinion
  Were there any Klein bottles?
• Kirr
  Philip K. Dick's "Small Town" is found!
• LeonB
  There’s never a train when you want one, but when you don’t they’re everywhere!
• astrange
  > His love of rail started when he was young, through a Japanese cartoon about a crime-fighting train.I think this is Brave Express Might Gaine…?
• adxl
  Serendipity.
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  deadbabe
  “Honey, look at this massive model train network that just happened to be in our basement!”
• bbarnett
  The model train setup Daniel Xu found beneath the home he just purchased is impressive, but it has proven an even greater delight, given he is a train engineer and train enthusiast. Source: SBS NewsUh huh... fortunate indeed.My immediate thought was, his wife discovered his hobby, and the money spent, and "No, it was here when we moved in!"Then the news shows up, and of course, he can't tell them different, or busted!
• gonzo41
  This guy is so lucky. We all have to build our own. What a head start.
• SoftTalker
  [flagged]
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  SudoSuccubus
  [flagged]