"I hear the train a-coming, it's rolling round the bend..."

These may look deathly dull to you (and indeed, to me).
But Frank Sinatra would have appreciated them. So would Johnny Cash. And Joe DiMaggio, Yul Brynner, Walt Disney and, er, Hermann Goering...
And hopefully my dad will too, since Hornby "track packs" A, B and C were his birthday presents from his sons last week, after I struggled manfully to somehow understand the basics of railway modelling...
My dad received for Christmas a basic "Orient Express" trainset for his study, after my mum asked him what he really wanted as a present. Assuming he was joking the first time, it was only when he repeated the request a week later that she, baffled, bought the set which has provided childlike pleasure since being tentatively assembled on his study table...
This new hobby does make buying future birthday/Christmas presents reassuringly straightforward, though track packs A and B did look disappointingly dreary for a gift. Apparently, though, they are the essential facilities needed before venturing into the loop-providing excitement of track pack C and beyond... Well, take it on trust, anyway...
Next stop, a second train (which would have been fairly pointless without a second track): but the supposedly-most popular new engines on sale, the Hogwarts Express replica and the Thomas The Tank Engine just seem too desperately naff...
This country music-blaring, Wild-West-raring train sounds much more like the ticket, both in fantasy and in real life, and I'd love one day to ride it.
In the meantime, I'll suggest to my dad motoring his Orient Express around the slowly-slowly-developing tracks, and playing Gram Parsons CDs.
The ever-cool curator of 'cosmic American music' was featured in a nifty little Radio 2 documentary the other day, now available online, which told the familiar old tale of his short life - and crazy aftermath of his death - with some occasionally-illuminating interviews with cacklin' Keef Richards, the always-entrancing Emmylou Harris, madman manager and Gram's-body-burner Phil Kaufman, and the "Grievous Angel" Gram himself.
Yet it was frustrating to hear brief snippets of his dolorous, delightful music - the heartslicing Love Hurts, the epic Return Of The Grievous Angel, the rollicking live version of Merle Haggard's California Cottonfields, a few samples from the Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, one of the most importantly-influential American records of all time - only for them to be cut off quickly too soon...
Yet country music and trainsets do seem to go together.
As well as the Man In Black, other enthusiasts appear to have included Haggard himself and Roger "King Of The Road" Miller, according to this handy - if surprising - round-up.
Alongside The Who's Roger Daltrey and John Entwhistle (I assume, while they were intrepidly debating second radius double curves and class J83 early BR locomotives, Townshend and Moon were off somewhere else playing bridge...), Neil Young, Gary Coleman, Lionel Ritchie, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks, David Hasselhoff, Kevin Costner and Elton John.
Not to mention legendary hellraiser Rod Stewart, who once proclaimed: "I'd love to be on the cover of Railway Modeller. That would mean more to me than the cover of Rolling Stone."
Perhaps "Downtown Train" was an even more heartfelt, emotional song than anyone might have imagined...