When Daniel Xu shuffled through a tiny side door into the dark crawl space underneath his newly purchased Melbourne home, he sensed there was a bit more inside than he expected.

After his eyes adjusted and light filtered through, Xu was stunned: he’d just stumbled into one of the biggest homemade model railway sets he’d seen.

The expansive labyrinth of train tracks and miniature locomotives was particularly exciting for Xu, given he works for Metro Trains as an engineer.

“It was amazing,” he says. “I rushed my wife to come downstairs. It was unbelievable.”

This rail enthusiast’s discovery was the handiwork of Raymond Gray, who died aged 87 in March 2020.

His son, Steven Gray, told The Age he remembers his father started the project around the late 1970s in a garden shed, which was soon too small for what he planned over the next 40 years.

“The railway set grew and grew until it was almost the size of the house, under the house,” Steven says. “Dad was a huge train enthusiast. His family trips involved ‘chasing trains’ around Victoria and, at times, interstate.”

After Raymond Gray died, his family decided the train set was too big and intricate to dismantle.

“It was perhaps the hardest part of having to sell the house,” Steven Gray says. “Dad left such a legacy in that train set alone.”

Eventually, Xu bought the Grays’ old home, in Melbourne’s north-east, at auction in January. No one mentioned anything about the train set underneath.

While he inspected much of the property, Xu didn’t check what was behind the tiny trap door hidden down the side of the rundown brick house before he settled in April. He planned to renovate extensively for when his parents move in one day.

“But since I discovered this, I told the renovation people to protect this when they do some work down here,” Xu says.

Steven Gray, meanwhile, is thrilled that a fellow train enthusiast has taken ownership of his father’s passion.

“The expressions on anyone’s face when they first see the train set was always priceless,” he says. “For us not to see it again is sad, but to have someone purchase the house and [who] will make it his own … well, that is an amazing story in itself.”

Steven Gray remembers his father spent so much time underneath the home that a buzzer connected to the crawl space was installed “just so we all didn’t always have to yell through the floors to get Dad’s attention”.

“So when it was time for dinner, for example, the buzzer was pressed!”

Xu plans to get the old train set up and running again after it was left untouched for years, which meant it lost much of its previous functionality.

Although he has already started researching how to restore it, he expects the old wiring and complexity means it could take a while.

However, his experience with trains in Australia after emigrating from China could be handy: he points out that he’s worked on the full-size versions of at least two of the model locomotives in the miniature railway set.

Xu says he has been in touch with the Grays, who say Raymond was a fitter and turner who always wanted to be a train driver, but his eyesight prevented it.

Under a few cobwebs and dust, the miniature railway set that Gray built still displays his hours of toil and investment.

Dozens of knobs cover switchboards that help operate the tracks. The walls are painted with mountainous landscapes to provide a picturesque backdrop. The train lines zigzag between a maze of pillars in a room that you can’t quite fully stand up in.

Gray’s eldest daughter, Deb, in a message sent to The Age via her brother, Steven, says Raymond was born in Richmond and was a diehard Tigers fan who “loved to just get in the car and drive all over Australia”.

Raymond’s granddaughter, Jackie, in another passed-on message, says: “He was smart and inquisitive. [He] had his daily delivery of The Age and didn’t just focus on the sports section.

“He was different things to all of us, but I loved his black and white persona. There was never a time you didn’t know where you stood with him.”

Steven, meanwhile, remembers his dad loved nothing more than showing his grandkids how his train set worked.

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