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By Nadia Pflaum in It's Five O' Clock Somewhere, Out & About

Fri., Nov. 27 2009 @ 2:00PM

I was at Union Station last weekend, enjoying the model trains weaving around the extensive set-up in the lobby, when I noticed some familiar faces among the exhibit's tiny populace.

Not far from the accident scene that C.J. Janovy recently photographed, a cluster of little dudes are hanging out on a rocky ridge. But unlike the multitude of other plastic people in the set, likely acquired from hobby shops and model-railroad enthusiast kits, these are Homies, the collectible 50-cent characters once sold in vending machines in the lobbies of grocery stores and laundromats.

For a while, the little dudes had quite a niche in pop culture. But you don't see 'em around so much anymore -- and I definitely didn't expect to see them kickin' it in the quaint world erected by Union Station's model railroad club.

Luckily, Mike Laboi, vice president of the Union Station Model Railroad Society, was on hand to tell me the story of how these Homies found their way to this side of the tracks.

Laboi says that a few years ago, an African-American employee of Pierpont's inquired as to why there were no black faces in the model's miniature scenes. Laboi made an effort to track down some new figures and added them to the set.

Last year, a Latino employee of Pierpont's asked Laboi why he didn't see any brown faces. Laboi almost got frustrated. The chief concern of most model railroad hobbyists, after all, is the precision-scaled accuracy of the locomotives and boxcars circling the tracks. The people, like the trees and lampposts and little stores and cemeteries, are just landscaping. Didn't the volunteer model-railroad crew have enough work on their hands without being expected to create a PC, It's A Small World reflection of the world's diversity?

But the Latino restaurant worker already had a solution. He donated a handful of Homies from his own collection to Union Station's set.

When I visited the lobby again a few days later to photograph the Homies, another model railroad club volunteer told me he was planning to add more of the figures to the exhibit.

In our conversation, Laboi wondered aloud when our society will be able to get past the things that divide us, like race.

I think getting past it shouldn't be the goal. If visitors to the exhibit are so drawn into the miniature scenes that they want to see themselves reflected in the tiny world, it means that the Union Station Model Railroad Society is succeeding in its goal: to get non-enthusiasts invested in the hobby.

It makes their small world that much bigger.