When Bruce Davison, of West Paris, first began making wooden toy trucks 13 years ago, he watched two young boys zipping theirs up and down an aisle at his church. His payoff, he said, was seeing “the little test pilots” enjoying the trucks he built.

Davison understood that kind of play. He grew up working with his builder father’s scrap wood. He said no child should be without something “to imagine with.”

He leaves the trucks unfinished so children can paint or decorate them however they want.

This season, he made 37. He gave 16 to The West Paris Free Christmas Shop and eight to Helping Hearts in South Paris where he works Tuesdays. The rest went to friends or were donated to his church to sell.

“Do you think this will be enough?” he asked Marybeth Ray, who, along with Lorie O’Neil, organized the West Paris Free Christmas Shop. He didn’t want any child to be without toys on Christmas, O’Neil said. Davison and his wife stayed after the delivery Dec. 13 to help set up the shop, she said.

Woodworking is only part of Davison’s story.

He said he fell in love with his high school sweetheart, Pam, after they went to a concert and heard the Turtles song “Happy Together” in 1978. The next day, they went snowmobiling.

After being married to others, they reunited 33 years ago.

“I got to marry my high school sweetheart and I got to do my dream job,” he said.

That dream job was railroading. Davison became a conductor for the Claremont and Concord Railroad, a career he wanted as a child. His father discouraged railroad work and steered him toward woodworking. At first, Davison said, he built furniture mainly to fund his railroad habit — buying lanterns, magazines and other artifacts.

When he was offered a job for C & C, “I was green as grass, but all of a sudden one day it all clicked. I made a career out of railroading.”

On the side, he continued to do woodworking, finishing and repairing furniture for his mother and another antique dealer, for years.

The 19th-century home he shares with his wife reflects both passions. It feels more like an antique store, packed with pie safes, his restored wagon seat, tin toys and metal sand pails; baskets, hooked rugs and antique toys fill the space. At Christmas, a German Putz village sits by the window alongside tiny Christmas trees with tiny ornaments. Buying for Pam, Bruce said, is easy.

They’ve collected so much that they no longer make their annual trip to what they call the largest antique store in the world in Springfield, Ohio.

The antiques influence his woodworking, too. Davison’s toy trucks feature a “C” cab he recreated from an antique Strombecker truck.

Two members of the historic Penley family of West Paris once lived in the Davisons’ house, near the old clothespin makers’ mill.

For Davison, the history still fits.

“This was an area for woodenware,” he said.