Small wonders fill Oro Valley artist's model-train world

When Bob Murphy makes the rounds at yard sales, secondhand stores and Craigslist, he sees things a little differently than most.

A weathered, wooden trellis normally used in an outdoor garden is building material for a turn-of-the-century Western saloon.

Inside a board game he sees parts that make perfect window frames for a feed store.

Toy Easter eggs look like watermelons when they’re painted green and put on a smal, handmade wooden wagon at a vintage produce store.

Murphy is a builder but not in the sense most people would think.

For the last five years, Murphy has immersed himself in the hobby of building Old West buildings for G-scale model-train layouts. They are on display throughout his Oro Valley home, in the living room, in a bedroom where he keeps his collection of trains, in the hallway, on a cabinet in the dining room.

Put the buildings together and one can envision an extremely detailed, mini-version of the Old Tucson movie studio. The “Tucson Produce” store is complete with miniature baskets of oranges, red chiles, cucumbers and carrots. “Jack’s Whiskey Palace” has a glass window made from an actual Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey bottle.

“I like turn-of-the-century Old West buildings,” Murphy said. “You need buildings to go along with your train layout to make it interesting.”

It all started when Murphy took an interest in model trains after taking a tour of the rails that are set up and maintained by the Tucson Garden Railway Society. The group, formed in 1994, manages and maintains model train layouts at the Tucson Children’s Museum, the Tucson Botanical Gardens and Tucson Medical Center. The society’s 75 members also set up layouts at the Pima County Fair, the SAHBA Home Show and other events in the Tucson area.

“As a kid, a train was a toy that we had,” said Murphy, a career salesman who retired earlier this year.

But as a kid it wasn’t the passion that it is today for him and his supportive wife, Lucy, who keeps all his materials organized throughout the one-acre property where they live.

“I joined the club five years ago when we went on a tour of the rails that the garden club sponsors,” Murphy said. “That’s where we took an interest. We thought it was pretty fun stuff.”

He started to act on that interest by buying a simple train set that he found at a thrift store. But things escalated quickly when he started looking around for buildings to add to his layout. He found plenty of items on the internet, usually plastic kits that he considered expensive, but he took that to a much higher level.

“Everybody has the same buildings that you buy as a kit, so I started making my own buildings,” he said.

The collection of buildings around his home suggests that he jumped in with both feet and an eye for making building materials out of some of the strangest items. His career managing an Ace Hardware store and working for Home Depot helped him develop the sense of finding alternative uses for ordinary materials.

“When I look at something, I always wonder what that can be,” he says as he holds the plastic end of a kid’s jump rope that will serve as a smokestack on a building. On another building, he points to a toothpick dispenser he picked up a thrift store. It’s painted silver and looks like a scale version of a water tank.

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To make a corrugated tin roof that was standard in the Old West, Murphy will take an aluminum soda can and cut off the top and bottom to make a thin sheet of aluminum. He will put the sheet through a paper crimper that can be bought at an office supply or craft store, and it makes an authentic-looking corrugated roof.

But for more detail, Murphy will make his own rust to make the roof and parts of other buildings look weathered.

“I take a wad of steel wool, dip it in water, set it in a jar for about two weeks and it turns to rust,” he said. “I ground it down to a fine powder, and then you just take a paint brush and brush it on to make it look rusty. I don’t think many people make their own rust.”

Bottle caps become light fixtures. The plastic pearls from a toy necklace are light bulbs. Leftover ceramic tile is cut into smaller pieces to look like adobe bricks and serve as a foundation for “Bigbang Explosives,” a store where someone in the day could apparently buy dynamite and gunpowder.

“He’s an artist,” said Lucy, who also is retired but does home organizing as a side business. She uses those skills to keep their home and her husband organized. Closets, two sheds and the garage are loaded with building materials and train parts.

She’s also Murphy’s biggest fan.

“When he started, I would take a picture as soon as he put a piece of wood on the table. I’m on my third scrapbook,” she said. “I want people to see his work because it’s so great. What comes of it is not what’s important.”

Murphy said he’s never really considered selling the buildings, and it’s unlikely he would make money from the time and effort it takes to make a building. He estimates that any one of the detailed buildings takes 40 to 50 hours to complete from the time he develops a concept and starts putting it together.

“It’s pretty labor-intensive. A lot of hobbies are that way,” he said. “You really can’t get your money back out of them.”

He did once make a trade with a friend who did some landscaping work in return for a couple of buildings. But, for the most part, a building gets built and it finds a place somewhere in the Murphys’ home.

Most of the work takes place on a small craft table he has set up in his living room, so he’s not hiding away in a workshop for hours at time. He works on the buildings intermittently, so it’s difficult to calculate how much time he puts into the craft in a given week. He might stay away for days then get going on a project and spend a lot of hours on it in a short period of time.

Neither Bob nor Lucy can really pinpoint where their fascination with the Old West originated. Bob is from Pittsburgh and Lucy from Chicago. They relocated to Tucson separately in the late 1970s. But their home − aside from all the model buildings — has a strong Old West flavor with relic rifles mounted on the walls, decorative saddles and old-time signage throughout.

“We had the Western thing going way before the trains,” Lucy said.

“We just found the Western motif kind of exciting,” Murphy said. “That’s the history of Arizona.”

The long-term vision, Murphy said, is to have a huge room where he can lay out a train track and surround it with the buildings to create an elaborate Old West scene. Lucy is encouraging him to knock down a wall in the home to make a room big enough for the setup. But since that’s something in the distant future, the couple takes their joy from watching their grandkids have fun on the track when they lay it out on the back porch.

“My grandkids come from Oregon and we set the whole thing up for them,” Lucy said, “and they are out there all … day … long.”