DECATUR - There's never a dull moment in Burkhartville.

And right on cue comes the afternoon express, whistling down the tracks, when it suddenly hits a faulty switch and the locomotive goes one way and several of the cars go another.

Two hapless mules, grazing nearby, never had a chance.

Side-swiped by a fish-tailing car loaded with rocks, they went over the edge of the world and plummeted a good 4 feet to the concrete floor of Chuck Burkhart's converted Decatur garage, now home to his extensive model train layout and collection.

"Well," said Burkhart, who strides to the rescue in bib overalls, blue eyes twinkling. "That didn't hurt none." He sets the twin plastic mules, all of an inch high, back into pastoral place.

"But trains can do that in real life, too, and that is what causes a lot of derailments."

Burkhart, 75, should know. He spent 45 years working as a crane operator on the railroad before shunting into retirement from Norfolk Southern Corp. in 1995. His dad had been a railroad crane operator, his grandpa was one and his own son, Chuck Jr., does the same job right now. When trains have become so much a part of your DNA, leaving them behind is a bit like derailing your heart.

Burkhart sought to get all aboard again and found his opening through model trains in all shapes and sizes. And the new-found hobby got a jump-start several years ago when he was told about a young guy in Monticello selling his late grandpa's extensive yesteryear train collection so he could raise some money for college.

"He had 500 or 600 engines, a lot of them in their original boxes, and he had over 1,000 cars," Burkhart said. "He wanted $2,000 for all of them, and when I came back and told my wife, she just raised hell."

Burkhart licked his wounds, slept on it and then rode the rails to the bank. His wife, Marilyn, can't pretend she was taken aback.

"Trains are his life," she said. "And he knows everything when it comes to his trains. And now he's discovered eBay."

The Burkhart learning curve has gathered speed steadily. "At first, I would buy a lot of stuff that I paid way too much money for," he said. "But you read and you learn what is good and what's bad."

He's since parlayed that original $2,000 investment into a train collection that runs into the many hundreds, all of them carefully selected for desirability. Groaning shelves line the walls of the converted garage and are filled with engines and cars in all shapes and sizes, some dating to the 1930s. The train master, a gifted Mr. Fix-it, can repair anything that ails them and now has business cards labeled "Burkhart's Trains n' Thangs: Buy, Sell, Trade, Repair - 422-6288."

Visitors get shown around while he points out various trains at random, rattling off prices so fast they quickly jam mental cash registers. It's all about rarity and details, the kind of subtle little detail that makes one model train so much more desirable than another. He tells of spotting a tiny and nondescript plastic railroad flat car at a train show in Decatur priced at $5. It was designed to be part of a set with a matching automobile, and if you can marry the two together - a rare feat these days - the combination becomes a nice investment.

"Worth about $900," said Burkhart, who already had the automobile. "But you must have that vehicle before it's worth anything. You have to know that."

Wheeling and dealing, he's become an expert whose hobby pays for itself and then some. "That original $2,000? Paid it all back long ago," he said.

Back at Burkhartville, the express continues on its way, the mules are safe and there is time to take in some of the other quirky details.

There's a little cemetery, for example, complete with tiny, leaning headstones and a wee plastic, skeletal ghoul. Nearby, Steven Spielberg's ET can be glimpsed hiding behind a tree, and there's a guy in the process of tipping over a 1½-inch-high outhouse with somebody inside it.

"Oh, I just pick stuff up at yard sales," Burkhart says by way of explanation for the characters in his world. "I like a little bit of everything."

Tony Reid can be reached at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.