I was born and raised in The Netherlands. I moved to the U.S. in 1980, and eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen. My inspiration for model railroading started with my parents occasionally taking us to Madurodam in The Hague, The Netherlands. This area is a 1:25 scale model of most major features of Holland. The trains move, the boats float, and the little people walk on sidewalks. Lots of buildings, sound, animation, and many trains. Visitors walk on paths that meander right through this little world. As a little boy (a picture of me - yeah, you can't get more typically Dutch than that!), this was a dream world!

The small town where we lived was a major tourist attraction during the summers. This caused passenger trains to stop at our town during that time. The rest of the time they just flew past our little passenger station as if we didn't exist. I enjoyed riding my bike to the station every once in a while and watching (and occasionally photographing) the trains passing by. I was a "railfan" back then.

In my teens I was given an N-scale Fleischmann train set. My bedroom in Holland wasn't that big, so a 2' x 4' layout was built that never really got much further than the track-laying stage. Nonetheless, the layout provided hours of fun and imagineering. I scratch-built some buildings from left-over wood and had a couple of small kits. You can see some photos in the "Layouts" section of this web site.

Sometime after moving to Houston, Texas, my Dad, my brother, and myself went to see an HO-scale layout somewhere in town. If I remember correctly, one of my Dad's co-workers was a member of this club and invited us. I seem to remember they had a floor in an office building. The layout was behind glass, and you would duck under the various areas. It was an amazing little world. When I left Holland, I left the hobby behind to pursue playing bass guitar in a garage band.

After graduating from college, getting married, and starting my computer programming career, I eventually got back into the hobby when things settled down. In August of 1999 I came back to N-scale in full force. I built several layouts and had a lot of fun and learned a lot. Nine years later I felt that it was time for a change and I switched to S-scale. I had learned that I love building things from scratch, so my focus has become more on building and enjoying the process, rather than quickly building a layout from immediately-available, finished materials.

I am now building a small switching layout in S-scale in one of our spare bedrooms. Although I can't model the large mainline that I tried to in N-scale, I am making more progress on the S-scale layout than I ever did in any of my previous layouts. The benchwork, trackwork, and basic scenery are all done. I am building freight cars and engines as well as structures.