It is not often that a person gets to combine his two loves into one hobby.

But civil engineer and former Wareham Fire Department Captain Charles Rowley has done just that -- turning his love of the fire department and his detail-oriented engineering background into a model building hobby that has garnered him national awards.

"Some people play the piano, I build fire engines," Rowley said.

Rowley has built just fewer than 50 models of fire trucks, most of them based off of real vehicles that have been owned by the Wareham Fire Department, or that he has seen in national shows and online.

Because there are no kits to build his models, he must create them from scratch, using pictures and measurements of trucks that he takes himself.

If he sees the truck he likes in a magazine or online, he reaches out to fellow hobbyists around the nation for help in the preliminary data collecting.

"There is a fair amount of preparatory work that goes into it before you can ever start building," Rowley said.

Rowley builds his models in 1/25 or 1/32 scale. Trucks may have doors that can open and close, compartments with miniature wrenches, or gold "Wareham" lettering - all of which helps the model get as close to its real-life counterpart as possible.

"The idea is to make it look real," Rowley said. "And you can't make it look real unless you put the detail into it."

The attention to detail has earned Rowley awards from model-building competitions as close as Boston and as far away as Salt Lake City, Utah.

But it also means that models can take many months to complete. One of them, a 1937 ladder truck owned by the City of Fall River, took two-and-a-half years.

The effort was worthwhile, however, as it has since garnered Rowley nearly 10 awards.

While some may dread the detail-oriented nature of the work, Rowley revels in it.

"I love it, it's just the time you spend working on it … every little piece of it is a model in itself," he said.

Rowley, who is now 72 years old, first began building models from pre-fabricated kits when he was 12 years old.

He got his love for trucks while he accompanied his father, who was a civil engineer and land surveyor, on projects laying out roads for the state government where he would see bulldozers, scrapers, and other heavy machinery that fascinated him.

"The fact that I like real ones to begin with," Rowley said, "creating a small one is appealing," Rowley said.

When Rowley was 16 years old, he joined the Wareham Fire Department.

"Every kid in the neighborhood, when they got to be 16 or 17, they wanted to join the Fire Department," Rowley said. "When you're 16 or 17 years old, it's a fun thing to do, riding on the back of a fire engine."

Rowley worked his way up to captain on the department and stopped working on models as often.

Around the age of 40, however, he picked the hobby back up after heading to Plymouth to renew his driver's license and stumbling upon a model-making hobby magazine.

"Putting my interest in the fire service in with my interest in model building, it just went together," Rowley said.