It worked !
Wow, that was just perfect !
As I had planned, I got up before hubby did. In and of itself that isn't necessarily unusual at our house as I am a bit more of a morning-person "Lark" than he is. I dug the train out of hiding, and set it up on the little oval of track that now occupies our dining room table to the exclusion of using the table for anything else. I was so nervous I had trouble getting everything on the rails! Maybe ten minutes later I heard him stirring, and he staggered out into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee.
It's not uncommon recently for one of us to just start a locomotive and a couple of cars running endlessly around on the table, so while I saw him glance over and see a train, and obviously he heard it chuffing in the background, initially he didn't notice that this was a whole new train, and a special one. So he stood there sipping coffee and talking with me about the upcoming birthday gathering. I tried my very best to act normal and keep a straight face. It must have been not more than five minutes, but it seemed like hours before he finally wandered over to the table and did a double-take!
And then, all the effort was worth it! He was ecstatic over it!
Silly, isn't it, a 72 y/o man getting all excited about a model of a real train he used to ride sixty years ago. Silly that his wife got weepy teary in joy over his reaction. Only here, among my peers who share the life-changing psychological disorder of addiction to model trains would I be likely to find understanding.
Thank you all for sharing this wonderful moment with me. Thanks especially to Keith Robinson who made the dcc/sound conversion happen in a narrow time-window. Thanks, more than anything, for so many of you caring about a complete stranger who showed up asking for help and got it in spades.
Hugs, y'all,
Diane