Jim Roberts and his Helmsburg Train Project ~story and photos by Ryan Stacy
P
eople love Brown County for its surprises. On your first visit or your hundredth, you’ll find unexpected history, culture, and beauty in the corners of our towns, around the bends of our country roads, and deep in the forests of our parks. And some of our surprises aren’t found on tours or in guidebooks at all, but are hidden deep in the mosaic of the everyday life of our community. Take Jim Roberts, for example. Most local folks know Jim as a lawyer. For over 50 years he’s served Brown County in a number of roles, including county prosecutor, public defender, and currently as Nashville’s town attorney. In private practice, he’s also drawn up contracts, represented people in civil cases, and helped them with divorces and wills. When it comes to the law, you could say Jim’s tracks are all over the community. But outside of the courtroom, Jim can be found making tracks of a different kind—in the scaleddown replicas of the local railroad he’s laid out in the basement of his home north of Nashville. And though his two passions in life may seem unrelated on the surface, for Jim both his law career and his interest in model railroading are rooted in his deep connection to Brown County. Jim fell in love with trains at an early age. “An older cousin of mine showed me his toy trains when I was about two, and after that you couldn’t keep me away from them,” he laughs. He got his own train set at six years old, and since then he’s spent a good deal of time and money on his trains, first as a typical hobbyist and then as a serious collector. Jim says his fondest memories of growing up in Brown County were his days in a oneroom schoolhouse in Helmsburg. Of course, that experience also included trains—Jim’s schoolyard
22 Our Brown County • Jan./Feb. 2019
