EDITOR’S SOAPBOX: The Season of Trains Remembering good times with trains in the past ...
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Charlie Comstock has been a regular columnist, author, and editor of Model Railroad Hobbyist
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hristmas is a season of great joy for many people. Some visit with family and friends. Some find great joy celebrating the birth of their Lord. Others use it as an excuse for overeating. We model railroaders have an additional reason to celebrate. Many of us got our start with model trains on a long ago Christmas morning when we were greeted by the sight of a locomotive, cars in tow, chugging bravely around a Christmas tree. Over the years the favorite scale for train sets has changed. The popular sets have included Lionel and American Flyer, then HO and N scale. These days Thomas and Hogwarts play a significant role in the train set market. My dad gave me my first model train when I was five. We lived at 17 Sherwood Drive in Huntington, New York, not far from Cold Spring Harbor station on the Long Island Railroad. Our backyard ended at the tracks and I remember leaning over a split-rail fence and waving to the engineer and passengers on the trains that came speeding by. That first layout was a modest beginning – a 4’ x 4’ sheet of green plywood with a circle of track on it, and
Page 8 • Issue 11-12• Dec 2011
Editorial, page 1
an HO Athearn rubber-band drive locomotive (probably a Fairbanks Morse Train Master if I recall correctly after 50+ years). I was fascinated watching that train roll up the miles crossing vast distances one 4’ loop at a time. I’ve asked my dad, as we were standing together in the large room that holds the BC&SJ, if he had any idea what he was starting with that train set? He said “No!” In some ways that set was like a snowball at the top of the Matterhorn. With a gentle shove that snowball arrives at the bottom slightly larger than when it started! I recall Christmas at our vacation house in Sonoma County, California, in the late ‘60s when it was new. One of the items under the tree was an N scale train set. We didn’t have an official layout but we did have a few scraps of plywood left over from building the house. We set up the track on the plywood and watched the train run. It wasn’t long before we pulled out the Legos (actually, a precursor to Legos) and made a few buildings next to the tracks and even a plastic brick mountain with a tunnel for the train to run through. Very crude, out-of-scale, and not a bit of realistic weathering, but hey, I remember having a lot of fun doing that. Later on, while I was away in the Navy, my dad and younger brother morphed that set into 4’x10’ layout.
Fast forward the calendar to Christmas 2000, when my daughter was three. I spent several hours Christmas Eve laboriously putting together a Disney train set. It had a trough instead of track and a cloverleaf trackplan (if it could be called a trackplan). Each lobe of the cloverleaf had a miniature Disney-esque “ride”. The battery powered train would stop at each ride and make it spin around. When my daughter came down the next morning and saw the train chugging around the track, she was entranced! Since then, my kids loved, and then ignored dad’s trains (being a perfectionist doesn’t help your kids enjoy the hobby). But who knows, maybe they’ll remember trains some Christmas in the future, and their own kids will find train magic that morning? On a sadder note, my friend Ralph Livermore passed away earlier this week. When I moved to Beaverton in 1996, I sought out modelers in the area and met Ralph (and other members of a Tuesday round-robin group). The day we met, Ralph invited me home to see his trains. He later became a regular on the Bear Creek. Ralph, I’m missing you. There’s a lesson here – don’t wait to get together. Another day and it may be too late. Where are you going?
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