Corio children’s author, miniature train collector and Metro network controller John Smithers lives and breathes anything that runs on rails.
“I think the first words I ever said were choo choo,” the 58-year-old said.
“Trains got me through the darkest parts of my life.”
Growing up in Richmond with no siblings and alcoholic parents, now deceased, John said he found solace in watching trains.
“I was often left to my own devices and I found myself beside railway lines watching trains go by,” he said.
“I was fascinated by the signals, the flashing lights and the different types of trains that went past, they were like a rainbow.”
John’s other escape was telling stories in primary school, and he remembered bringing home a book he wrote that impressed his teachers.
“Dad was in one of his drunken stupors,” he said.
“He said, ‘that’s a piece of rubbish’ and threw it in the fire. That destroyed my ego.”
While the incident put him off writing for a while, he kept pursuing his other passion by working on the heritage Puffing Billy Railway.
Later, he worked on the then longest and heaviest trains in the world for Hamersley Iron hauling ore across the Pilbara.
He also opened a small model train factory in Sri Lanka in 1993 between various jobs on the railways.
“It was trains that gave me an opportunity to escape that home life and explore the world,” he said.
In the late 1990s, when he began dating his second wife Joy, he told her:
“One golden rule, don’t ever come between me and my trains – because you’ll lose,” he laughed.
“She actually got on board with the business.”
But when Joy suffered a stroke in 2012, John gave up his passion for the first time.
“For the last five years of her life I gave up trains and put the business on hold to look after her,” he said.
In 2017, a tram ringing its bell as he worked at the Kooyong signal box inspired a children’s book series combining his two passions – writing and rail.
“I made the comment, ‘shut up Trevor’, and it was that quip that gave me the idea for Trevor the Tram,” he said.
So he wrote a series of children’s books about Trevor, who foils bank robbers, transports firefighters to a blaze and helps a lost bride get to the altar on time.
He enlisted a fellow model train enthusiast from Adelaide as illustrator and published the first book, Trevor the Tram and the little lost boy.
Recently, Shepparton filmmaker Matt Poidevin contacted John to make a Thomas the Tank Engine-style film series on Trevor the Tram.
“We’re hoping to get the other books published as soon as we’ve got a couple of bucks behind us,” John said.
“They’re all sitting on a computer edited and ready to go. I’ve had a ball of a time working in rail.”
Details: www.trevorthetram.com.au
