When I was knee-high to a milk can, shortly after Thanksgiving, the parents would take my sister and I downtown to the “Big Two” department stores to stare at the window displays. Needless to say, the Lionel display was always my favorite.
My Father and my Uncle Pete would each do Christmas Tree trains and my Uncle built “large” (in my eyes, anyway) layouts in his basement for the season. My Father had a few that I remember, but stopped after a while.
A side note, my son now has my Father’s complete collection of Lionel from those days, including the coveted dual throttle, dual sub-throttle transformer! I loved getting my hands on that.
Needless to say, I’m a long-term addict of model railroading. Over the years, I’ve built eight or nine miniature worlds (does a complete rebuild count as two?) starting with the simple oval on a 4′ x 8′ piece of plywood, in HO scale. Eventually, I took on the impossible, at 17, building a copy of the Gorre and Daphetid of John Allen fame (the original layout, not the full-blown one, but thinking about it – for, after all, what is life without dreams). What a trip that was as I went beyond the running a small train around an oval to creating a world with real world purposes.
Then college got in the way. Not a lot of room in a dorm for a layout. Then work. Finally, a second bedroom in an apartment. Then the sad (happy) day that the layout when away, replaced by a crib and a changing table.
One Christmas, as I gave my two year-old a replica 1860s vintage, hand-built passenger car (named after her), my wife handed me a gift-wrapped box that blew me away. Can you say Marklin? Can you say Z scale? Two diesel-electric locomotives, one articulated steam loco. Cars. Enough for two freight trains (and leaving some on sidings) and a passenger train. Oh, and track. Switches. OMG! Heaven on a layout I could put under the bed when not in use!
These days, it’s XTrack and running virtual trains. But, hey, it’s still all good. Not to mention the annual issue or “Great Model Railroads”.
Yep. I’ve become an armchair modeller. On the other hand, I keep trying to figure out how to realistically model Broad Street Station in Richmond (in its heyday in the 1950s)… Oh, and the infamous Triple Crossing…
JP
