See that woodpile over there?

“Where?” you ask. “What woodpile?”

Bend down. Look closer.

Closer still.

There. Now you see it. Looks like a little stack of toothpicks, doesn’t it? Except toothpicks aren’t a mere 1/4-inch long. Also, these are much skinnier than toothpicks.

And toothpicks aren’t individually hand-carved.

These are. Hand-carved. Every last one of them.

Hand-carved with penknife and X-Acto blade by Gene Swanson of rural Pierce County.

Now straighten up. Widen your focus. Take a good look.

Take it all in.

What you’re now looking at is a world in miniature. A world right out of the American West of the 1880s.

A world traversed by railroad tracks. A world where small steam locomotives chug past a fenced-in small-scale farm pasture dotted with tiny grazing cattle, rattle through a tunnel bored into a forested mini-hillside, and clatter into a town where ant-sized men gather on the upstairs balcony of a miniature hotel watching a game of minuscule checkers.

The town is called Old Station. It’s served by the Hat Creek Railroad. Town and railroad are the lovingly crafted, incredibly detailed creations of Swanson, 69.

He’s a model railroader, and he’s a master at it. He’s even got a plaque to prove it: one issued by the National Model Railroad Association. “Master Model Railroader No. 412,” it says. There are only 414 people in the whole world who meet the association’s exacting standards.

Swanson is well-known in model railroad circles. He even conducts tours of the layout in the family room of his spacious home southeast of Tacoma. He tells of the time big tour buses brought hobbyists to his home from a model railroad convention in Seattle.

He keeps a guest book, and it’s signed by people from all over: Minnesota, Georgia, Virginia, Colorado, Australia, Japan.

What attracts them is his meticulous craftsmanship. What wows anyone who sees his layout is his attention to detail.

“I’m a detail fanatic,” he says. That woodpile (actually, there are two) stacked near the tracks is emblematic of his devotion to getting things just right, right down to the tiniest detail. Everything is scaled down to the scale of the rolling stock on Swanson’s HO-gauge railroad, which is 1/87th the size of the real thing.

For example … bend down again. Take a look through the open door of the town’s livery stable, past the horse with leg upraised and the man preparing to shoe the animal. Look inside and there you will see a blacksmith standing beside a minute forge working a set of diminutive bellows.

The interior is lit with a muted yellow glow. A visitor remarks that the light looks kind of dim. Swanson said that’s by design. Back in the day, only candles and lanterns illuminated homes and businesses.

Even the light level in Old Station is historically accurate.

His layout, which measures 11 feet by 11 feet and rests on a homemade bench nearly 4 feet high, is a work in progress. Swanson started building it back in 1990, and he’s been working on it ever since. Asked how far he is from completion, he answers, “I’m not even close.” Pressed as to whether he thinks it will ever be completed, he thinks for a moment: “Uh, no.” Then he laughs.

He runs only steam train replicas, unlike most model railroaders who vary between steam and diesel.

Why steam? He has fond memories of boyhood days spent down at the Tacoma rail yards (he was born in the city and graduated from Lincoln High in 1957), where he caught rides in the locomotives from indulgent train men.

“I’d go down behind Union Station, and they used to steam ’em up for their local runs. I’d get down there talking to the engineers and they’d let me ride in the cab with them.”

He says steam engines have more personality than diesels. He gets a faraway look in his eyes when he talks about standing down at trackside and listening to the steamers. “They just kind of breathe when they’re sitting there,” he says. “They’re so much fun.” Diesels, he says, don’t breathe.

He went into the glazing trade right out of high school – “everything you could think of with glass, I did,” he says – got married and raised three kids. When he retired, he got back into model railroading in a big – or more accurately, very small – and detailed way.

His miniature town is not modeled after any specific Old West settlement, but rather is a hybrid. The white clapboard church with the tall steeple is a replica of a church in Elbe. A covered bridge is an exact miniature of one in Oregon. The Wilson Bros. Sawmill is named for some of his uncles who are in the building business.

In addition to his home layout, Swanson also is a member of a group of model railroaders who maintain the permanent layout on the upper floor of the Washington State History Museum. He’ll be there doing docent duty during the museum’s annual Model Train Festival, which runs through Jan. 3. Pay him a visit there. He’ll be happy to regale you with detailed tales of days of steam on the Hat Creek line.

Soren Andersen: 253-597-8660