Virtual HO:
Notes from a Virtual Scale Model Village
You meet him in a basement apartment that smells of stale Red Bull and the warmth of electronics left on too long. Call him Matt. Thirty-three, soft-spoken, a little pale the way indoor men are pale. He sits on a thrift-store couch like it's a control tower, his VR headset lifted onto his forehead like a welder on coffee break. His eyes have the startled look of someone who has just come back from a world more engaging than this one.
Matt is a member—unwitting, unorganized, and profoundly unbothered—of a small but steadily assembling demographic I’ve come to think of as the "Virtual HO" generation. They are the successors to two earlier tribes: the obsessive mid-century train men, and the indoor gamers who replaced cowboys with controllers since the 1980s.
I'm working from the new book, "HO It Happened: From Balsa Wood and Latex to the Virtual 4K HO," by Prof. Chester Featherstone.
- Electric train sets were developed from 1910 to 1935 (Märklin in Germany, Lionel in US), but they saw their golden era in the 1950s and in the 1:87 HO scale. The train era died out as its denizens - mostly obsessive, technologically adept males - turned to online video games like Dungeons and Dragons, from 1975 forward.
- The era of the gamers, the boys with lanyards; the ones who survived dead-end Radio Shack jobs by descending into the basement. Shamans conducting séances on 5" floppies running DOS.
Matt is a hybrid of both eras: he has become a craftsman who no longer uses his hands.
Rather than using Virtual Reality to recreate better online games, he's part of a sizable minority of VR addicts who are addicted to "Virtual HO" - their preferred shareware. Wearing a VR hood, he tends to a model village he has crafted in obsessive detail—a country store with lighting by code; a 4K tunnel that could never have been sculpted by Gramps in styrofoam.
And these locomotives have a polygon count grandfather could not have imagined.
Matt tells me, with a tone of mild defensiveness, “It’s more efficient than a physical set.” His real apartment has only one plant and it’s plastic. But Matt's digital town has a hundred trees, all of them rustling in the AI wind he tweaked for five straight nights.
It is nostalgia, engineered.
A yearning for a time before their time, filtered through the technology of their time.
In this sense, the Virtual HO men are less a new species than a continuation of an old one: the contemplative bachelors of the industrial age, the ones who sought order in scale models during wars, recessions, divorces, and the slow erosion of civic clubs. Their worlds are controlled, knowable, obedient. Their landscapes do not resist them.
Where Matt’s grandfather glued ballast to plywood, Matt selects from long drop-down menus of gravel textures. His grandfather laid track by hand with a tweezers; Matt extrudes rail into 3D space and sets friction values.
But the impulse is the same.
So every generation must have its miniature-makers—those who cannot manage the world as given but can master the world as imagined. In the 1950s, they crouched in attics and basements. In the 1980s, they hid in Silicon Valley garages linked to college computer labs six states away.
Today in 2025, they sit in man-caves lit by the aquamarine glow of a headset charging on the shelf.
Matt puts the visor back on and disappears. His hands float in the gloom, conducting a silent orchestra. The train circles and circles.
And in the man cave, nothing moves at all.
