Walt Disney's Trains: This Week in Neurodivergent History
To the standard world, Walt Disney is a statue. He is the architect of childhood, a man of infinite, boundless imagination who wished upon a star and built a kingdom.
We look at the empire he left behind, the movies, the parks, the culture, and we assume he was a machine. We assume he operated on a linear path of constant, unceasing creative output.
In reality, Disney was a seeker. And like many seekers, he faced the brutal friction of a world that did not understand him. Remember, this is the man who was fired from the Kansas City Star because his editor told him he "lacked imagination and had no good ideas."
Disney had to look at himself and trust his compass when the entire world was telling him the needle was broken. But trusting the compass is only the first step. To build Disneyland, to drag that massive vision out of the orange groves of Anaheim and into reality, Disney had to enter a terrifying deep dive that would last years.
A fire that burns that hot consumes fuel at a terrifying rate. The danger for a seeker like Disney wasn't that he would run out of ideas. The danger was that he would burn out.
So, how did he survive? How did he manage the crushing weight of finance, construction, and artistic pressure without collapsing?
He didn't do it by working harder. He didn't do it by staring at blueprints for 18 hours a day.
He did it by playing with trains.
In this week’s episode of This Week in Neurodivergent History, we explore the specific survival strategy Walt Disney used to protect his agency.
When the pressure of the studio became too much, Disney didn't hide in bed. He went to his backyard, to the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, a 1/8th scale steam locomotive he built himself.
He put on his engineer’s cap, he picked up an oil can, and he got to work. To the outside observer, this looked like a distraction. It looked like a grown man wasting time with toys while his business was at a critical juncture. But Disney wasn't wasting time. He was retrieving. He was engaging in the ideal 'berry patch' activity, meeting the three critical criteria we discuss in my book:
High Sensory Input: The smell of the grease, the heat of the steam, the cold steel of the engine. It pulled him out of the abstract anxiety of his mind and grounded him in the physical reality of his body.
Low Cognitive Load: Tightening a bolt does not require complex decision-making. It is a simple, mechanical loop. It allowed his exhausted executive function to rest.
Visible Completion: When he fixed a coupling or laid a track, it stayed fixed. In the chaos of business, where nothing is ever truly "done," the train offered him a tangible, undeniable victory.
Agency Through Regulation
Disney’s obsession with trains wasn't a quirk; it was a structural load-bearing wall in his psychology. It was the shelter that paid for the flight.
By scheduling this time, by intentionally stepping away from the "important" work to do the "useless" work, he was regulating his nervous system.
He was proving that the seeker doesn't survive by being a machine that runs 24/7. The seeker survives by being an organism that knows when to fly and when to rest.
Watch the Full Story
In this week's video, we dive deeper into how Disney used this passion not just to survive, but to cross-pollinate his ideas, eventually turning his "useless" backyard hobby into the most famous theme park in the world.
Where is your train? What is the low-stakes, high-sensory activity that fuels you?
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