As the saying goes, curiosity killed the cat. But if you, like me, have both cats and model trains, it’s usually your layout that suffers the brunt of your cat’s curiosity. Model train layouts have all kinds of enticing chewable trees, invitingly textured landscaping, and of course, fun moving cat toys (a.k.a. locomotives). So what can you do to ensure your cats and model trains coexist peacefully?
I can hear the people out there now. “Just close the door!” Though that does make the most sense, it’s not always practical or possible. Not every train room has a door. My HO scale Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern layout is in my basement, which is also home to the cat litter box. So it can’t be completely closed off. I have two entrances to the train room blocked off with makeshift barricades made of pet gates, cardboard boxes, plywood, and a folding screen. The third entrance, which does have a closable door, gives access to the layout via a duckunder. This less than ideal situation is part of why I haven’t done much work on my model railroad recently.
And even that doesn’t always work. My two cats, Clinchfield (pictured above) and Missabe (named for the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range) are very curious about what goes on in that mysterious closed room. When the door to the train room is opened, one of them often tries to bolt inside. And the cat has much less trouble threading his way under the benchwork than I do, believe me.
Before I closed off the entrances, my older cats didn’t have much interest in the layout. Then we got Clinchfield, an energetic kitten. One day I found him modeling his own logging operation with my layout’s lovingly foliaged Scenic Express SuperTrees. I tried to gently shoo him off the shelf layout, but he got spooked and took off down the track like the evening express out of Cincinnati. After finally rousting him out of the train room, I started building my barricades.
My workbench is not in the train room, but in a part of the basement that can’t be closed off. Many is the time I’ve found strips of styrene or scale lumber on the kitchen floor, bearing the distinctive marks of pointy teeth. When I’m in the middle of a project that can’t be easily packed away, I’ve learned to drape a beach towel over the bench to conceal any fun-looking bits from nocturnal eyes.
I’ve been considering building an N scale shelf layout in this part of the basement. The fact that it can’t be closed off is what’s holding me back. However, I’ve thought about lining the fascia with plexiglass fences to deter leaping felines. This might work, but considering how determined my cats are, that fence would have to be pretty tall.
A sound solution
Like me, MR senior production editor Rene Schweitzer has cats and model trains. Her family’s two layouts, like mine, reside in the basement. While the N scale model railroad is behind a door that can be closed, there is no door to protect the O scale layout. Luckily, most of the Schweitzer cats have shown no interest in the layout after an initial investigation.
However, that was not the case with their cat Benny. Like my Clinchfield, Benny was very interested in harvesting model trees, as well as conducting scale cattle drives. For relief, Rene turned to a product she had reviewed for Garden Railways, the Contech CatStop (see page 110 of the April 2005 issue). This motion-activated device sends out a burst of ultrasonic sound, high-pitched enough to be inaudible to humans but irritating to cats and other critters. Although its intended purpose is to keep rabbits, deer, raccoons, and the like away from outdoor gardens (and garden railroads), Rene found it also worked well to keep Benny away from the O scale layout – at least until the batteries ran down.
Unfortunately, it seems that the CatStop is no longer sold. But there are other motion-activated ultrasonic animal repellers on the market.
Follow your nose
Bob Lettenberger, associate editor of Trains magazine, used to have trouble with his cats Kodiak and Tigger and his small HO scale model railroad. Once, a train climbing a series of loops hidden inside a mountain derailed with a crash. Looking through a tunnel portal for the source of the mishap, Bob was confronted with a pair of luminous green eyes. From under the benchwork streaked Kodiak. “I swear he was laughing as he pounded up the stairs,” Bob recalled.
Kodiak also had a habit of punishing Bob whenever he felt he had been mistreated – dinner served late, toy taken away, displaced from a nap spot. Kodiak expressed his displeasure by urinating on the basement floor in front of the layout’s control stand – “the exact place I had to stand to operate the railroad,” Bob said.
While Bob wasn’t able to break Kodiak of that smelly habit, his nose led him to a way to keep the big cat off the layout itself – laundry detergent. Bob found that the cat didn’t like the scent of a certain brand of powdered detergent, so he put a heaping spoonful into a number of hopper cars and covered the detergent with plastic coal loads. Stationing those cars around the layout made Kodiak a lot less interested in exploring Bob’s scale terrain.
Taking in the (Bona) Vista
Gerry Leone, a prolific contributor to MR and its special publications, has had four cats (named Norma, Phyllis, Irene, and Loretta) and four model railroads (all named the Bona Vista) over the last 23 years. None of the cats have ever damaged the layouts, Gerry says, mainly because he “nipped any possibility of that in the bud.”
The Bona Vista III (featured in Great Model Railroads 2008 and Great Model Railroads 2015) was built in a basement room without a door. “Then one night as I was building benchwork I happened to look up,” Gerry relates. “And there, peering out from behind an opening in the backdrop, was a little orange face – Phyllis.” Then and there, Gerry decided to add a pair of bifold doors to the train room entrance, before any breakable scenery or trains were put on the layout.
After Gerry, his wife, and the cats moved to a new home, construction started on the Bona Vista IV (see Great Model Railroads 2021). This version of the railroad was built in a walk-out den at the bottom of a staircase, again with no door. The cats were curious during benchwork construction, but they couldn’t do any harm at that stage.
Gerry tells what happened next: “A few years later I entered the other half of the room, where the scenery was finished, only to find my little buddy Irene curled up on a wetland on the layout made from comfortable, cushy fake fur. That was when I built a makeshift door in the stairway down to the den. Heaven only knows how many naps she’d already taken there during the day when Dad was at work.”
Gerry is in process of building a fifth version of the Bona Vista. The new train room has a door, but during the day, it stands open. Nonetheless, Gerry reports no feline intrusions so far. “My guess is that… neither of them has actually looked up from the floor and thought, ‘My, I wonder what’s up there?’ That day will undoubtedly come. And from then on the door will remain shut 24/7.”
Do you have any stories of cats and model trains? Share them below in the comments.
