That’s the message Lynda Fletcher received from some of her friends and family about her son, Andy. They wanted Lynda to find a way to get Andy, who has both epilepsy and Asperger’s Disorder, to hold down a traditional, 9-to-5 job. And stop spending so much time drawing trains.

Lynda saw things differently. She believed that Andy’s art, which takes the form of incredibly detailed and accurate depictions of locomotives and other rail cars, was something he needed to do to be healthy and happy. So instead of trying to deter his passion for rail art, she fostered it.

The result of her decision has been complex—for the past five years, Lynda and Andy have, in many ways, lived as nomads. They’ve traveled the country to generate opportunities for Andy to showcase his work.

His drawings are phenomenally popular, and Andy’s art and passion for trains ultimately inspired Norfolk Southern to paint its 20 heritage locomotives—a Trains magazine article on the locomotives labeled him a “heritage hero.”

Still, Andy is hardly getting rich off his work, and with more than a $1,000 a month in medical expenses, there have been times when Andy and Lynda have found themselves just a hair away from homelessness.

Stress and worry can aggravate Andy’s medical issues. When the future hasn’t always been clear, Andy credits his mom with taking the worry off his shoulders.

At moments like that, Andy says, “Mom would say, ‘You need to keep drawing trains. Some answer will come to this—don’t clutter your mind with what the answer will be.”

Andy has loved trains and loved drawing them for as long as he can remember. His mother and grandmother both encouraged his creativity.

As a young child, Andy recalls drawing with Mr. Sketch pens from his grandmother “that smelled like grapes and oranges.” Around the age of six, he drew hopper cars, cabooses and tank engines, all in “wildly different shapes and sizes.”

His mom strung them together to form a train, and hung them around his side of the bedroom, which he shared with his brother.

“My mom and my grandma were always there, in that Mary Poppins-esque way,” Andy said. “If you leap, the net will appear—and if they needed to, they would be that net.”

When he was 13, Andy got a camera for his birthday, and immediately began using it to photograph his favorite trains, then drew, in great detail, the locomotives and rail cars from his photos.

In his early 20s, Andy suffered a series of severe seizures. Eventually, adjustments in his medication brought them under control, but the seizures had impaired his fine motor skills. He painted watercolors during this period, and it took time to redevelop the skills he needed for drawing detail.

While Andy and his family had known he suffered from epilepsy since childhood, he was not diagnosed as having Asperger’s, a mild variant of the autism spectrum, until 2010, by a neurologist at an appointment for his epilepsy.

The diagnosis immediately made sense, Lynda said, and explained a lot of Andy’s behavioral characteristics— particularly his intense, almost unilateral, focus on trains and his drawings.

For Andy, Asperger’s brings with it rare talent and abilities, but also makes it difficult for him to thrive in traditional working environments.

The way he explains it, to get the dimensions of the lettering, wheels, doors, etc., accurate in his drawings, he is constantly performing complex calculations in his head, and storing all that information while he completes a drawing. The process, he says, is exhausting; once he has finished a drawing, he can’t dive right into another one.

He loves it, but it is only his passion for trains that allows his mind to work that way. While some might think he could take that ability to work complex formulas out in his head and transfer it to a more easily marketable skill, say in medicine or engineering, Andy explains that it isn’t quite that simple.

He cannot make his mind work that way outside of his scope of interest—essentially, railroads channel his energy and keep the wheels in his head turning in a way that nothing else can.

Lynda did not have the Asperger’s diagnosis in hand back in 2007, when Andy was finally able to return to drawing trains, and she decided to retire from her real estate career to do whatever it took to further Andy’s goals as an artist.

She just innately, as mothers do, understood her son’s needs, and she knew that drawing trains was what Andy needed to do.

The twisting, winding path the pair have followed since then eventually led them to Roanoke last year, where they’ve lived while Andy took on an unpaid artist-in-residence program at the Virginia Transportation Museum.

By that time, Andy had already begun working on drawings of potential heritage locomotives that he hoped Norfolk Southern might consider one day painting—but that was really just a dream at the time.

He did several drawings, then put the project aside for a time. As the railroad’s 30th anniversary neared, the project piqued his interest again, and by Christmas Eve last year, he had finished 30 locomotives. He posted some of the images to Facebook, and the rail community “went crazy,” Andy said.

Knowing that Norfolk Southern had an important board meeting just around the corner, Andy sent a poster with 18 of the drawings to CEO Wick Moorman.

That was Jan. 4. On Jan. 20, Andy got a call from Norfolk Southern’s locomotive engineering department. “We’re getting ready to paint your engines. Can you send us your jpegs?” the voice on the other end of the phone asked.

The process of bringing Andy’s dream to life ended up being a little more complex. Decisions had to be made about how many heritage locomotives to paint, which predecessor railroads to re-create, and which color schemes of those railroads to interpret.

Some of the drawings in Andy’s original poster were replaced with alternate versions from his collection—either a different railroad line, or a different color scheme for a particular railroad.

At the request of Norfolk  Southern, Andy drew two new renderings. He added one for Interstate Railroad, and drew a different version of the original Norfolk Southern Railway, which had been cloaked in gray, in its more colorful red scheme.

Once the final 20 locomotives to be painted were settled, Norfolk Southern printed a poster with Andy’s corresponding drawings, which Andy signed and gave out to visitors at the Family Portrait event.

Where this artist’s life will take Andy and Lynda next is yet to be seen. Wherever the tracks lead, Lynda is along for the ride.

“I do it for my son, because I love my son,” Lynda said. “But I also do it for all the people who love trains.”

Andy is grateful for the travel companion.

“One of my doctors said to me, ‘You are very good at seeing fine details, Andy, but you need someone who can help you see the big picture,” Andy said. “That’s my mom.”