Do you remember where you were, and what you were doing, when you decided that you wanted to become a serious modeler of railroads? Many of us received a Lionel 027 train set in early childhood, but mine had been rusting in the attic for many years before I heard The Call at age 11, and here is how it happened:
In the summer of 1966, I was in a hobby shop to buy some Roco Minitanks military models. While waiting in line for the cashier, I saw a rack with magazines that had pictures of great-looking HO trains on their covers, so I grabbed one and glanced thru it (it was the August 1966 issue of RMC). That did it - I was hooked! I never realized that even adults did this kind of stuff![8D] I put back one of the Minitanks models I had planned to buy, and bought the magazine instead. I must have read and re-read that entire magazine cover-to-cover hundreds of times. I requested a Tyco starter set as my main gift for the following Christmas, and the rest is history…
My first several recollections of MR’ng and wanting “to do” would put me back to the age of about six. Dad tried to start a layout got the track laid and kept it in the basement away from “little hands”. It would annoy me to no end that my cousin, who was living with us at the time and his friend would be allowed to “play” on the set and would give me a caboose to roll back and forth on a siding. (Woop Woop Woop) I finally was given a Lionel set, which never worked, and after several failed attempts shoved it on a box and stowed it.
Going to another cousins place on occasion I was allowed to watch but not partake in their Hornby layout.
But there was light at the end of the tunnel as every Christmas we would go downtown and see the layout in the Eaton’s store. That’s where the magic was.
I’ve been fortunate as I’ve been good creating with my hands. MR’ng was just a natural for me.
I also had and probably still have the personality that dictates that if you tell me “no” you’re not good enough for that and it’s beyond you… Watch Out! I’ll find a way to prove you wrong.
My uncle Steve passed down a set he had to me about when I was 12.
Being that age I was kinda aimless and it really didn’t hit me yet.
This is something that grew as I got older. I would dream of huge things.
The E C R came about one day at school (I got detention out of it ) while I
was bored and doodling a mass futuristic city, we’re talkin’ 1986 here. I
got it taken and got in trouble.
Today, I have my layout and my futuristic city is always in progress.
I do have my futuristic train, now it too is outdated. Go figure.
There have been a number of defining moments for me over the years. One that I had perhaps overlooked until just now was discovering Model Railroader Magazine in the school library, at the age of 11. I actually swiped a few issues, before getting my own subscription in August of 1973.
Eastcoast, that scenario sounds vaguely familiar, though I never got detention, just bad grades.[;)]
I grew up in Oakland, CA and my stepdad was a 22 year conductor on SP. We used to go see the Christmas layouts at Capwells and Kahn’s department stores. For my 10th b’day(1947) I got a Marx wind-up train on a little oval. The following year I got a Lionel electric! Wow! I remember it was odd and different from any of the SP locos I saw regularly. That I discovered was because it was a Pennsy S2 Steam turbine! That and the catalogs introduced me to model railroading! For Birthdays I would get an operating accessory and Christmas would mean a new freight car! Now in my late 60’s I don’t remember whatever happened to all that stuff. I am in HO for many years and now in the retired in the northwest (Port Townsend, WA) I model GN in '47/'48.
1939, five years old, San Francisco World’s Fair. My folks couldn’t drag me away from the O Scale model railroads (I think I remember two), so finally they just left me there and toured the rest of the place. World’s Fair? I wasn’t interested. I had found my Nirvana!
Angus Macdonald
Petaluma Valley RR
Our cousins sent us their 4 x 8’ American Flyer layout in the mail when I was a baby. (I was always too little to operate the train set myself.) At age 3, I figured out that if you pull up a small chair next to the layout, you could climb up on top of the train table and pu***he passenger cars around the layout. Sheer enjoyment to a 3-year old; sheer agony to my 11-year old brother.
As I got older and my brothers lost their interested in model trains, I would be the one to sand down the old steel track and get it up and going again. (My oldest brother eventually sold everything a few years ago, which included my American Flyer NW switcher, gondola, reefer, and caboose that I gotten for Christmas - right before AF went out of businss.)
We FF to Christmas 2002. I had some Christmas money “burning a hole in my pocket” and decided to visit a particular LHS for the first time 3 days before Christmas. Left the LHS with a Rivarossi 0-8-0 Yard goat to run around our Christmas tree. (I later returned the 0-8-0 because it didn’t work well and exchanged it for an Athearn 2-8-2 Mike - vast improvement!) After that I began gradually purchasing track and designing my layout for the day I would finally start building it.
This past May, I built my first layout table using 1 x 3’s, 2 x 2 legs, and 1-1/2 extrude foam insulation. What a joy to be able to finally lay out the track off the basement rug floor! [:)] The layout is still “in process” but I have enjoyed learning to build and paint kits, make trees, and learn some of the history of railroading as I’ve gone along.
The bug hit way back when I was just a wee lil’ pup but it nearly 40 years for it to finally come to fruition.
My grandfather bought me my first HO train set as a christmas present in 1976, I was 5, and we were best friends. He and I used it for 5 years until his death in 1981. After he passed, I missed his company, so running my train was a very lonely experience.
Needless to say, the train set went into a box, and up into the attic. When I left home I took the box with me, but never opened it…until one afternoon in 1998(age 27), while walking around Wal-Mart waiting for my wife to get her hair cut and styled, I went past the magazines and stopped when I saw the awesome model train on the cover of this magazine called “Model Railroader”, so I bought it and read some of it while they finished with my wife’s hair.
Until that time I had never realized what you could do with model trains. So when we got home I spent an hour looking among the boxes in our attic, to find the one box I hadn’t opened in 17 years. I opened the box and looked at the old trains and tracks, and remembered my grandfather. After a moment I decided to drag it out and set it up on the floor. When I did, my oldest daughter’s eyes lit up, exactly the way mine did years earlier. Now I know why he always wanted to run the train with me.
Here we are 6 years later and I’ve built a 4’ x 8’ layout with both of my daughters’ help. My oldest daughter wanted to switch to N scale, so She and I are building a layout for that one as well.The owner of my LHS(who has seen our layouts) recommended me to a gentleman who was looking to have a layout built, So I’m in the process of building a 6’ x 12’ HO scale layout at his home. As for my youngest daughter, she’s still in HO scale, but she thinks the opposite of her sister, she wants BIGGER trains. I told her to save her pennies if she’s going to dream big!!
last year around this time i went over to my friends house to help him set up a yahoo ID so he could play fantasy basketball with us. when i walked in the door his dad told me to come down and look at the train room. i walked down and was in awe. just the sight of all the trains and the scenery and everything on the layout made me want to start. so i came home, got out my old train set from when i was about 6-7 years old. i asked my parents if i could used the spare room upstairs for trains. said i’d need a place big enough to have a 4x8 layout in. my mom and i started clean out the room, it was used for storage up to this point. we got enough room and i put a 3x5 sheet of wood down on saw horses and set out a straight section of track down. after a couple months and a few more shows my dad went to the lumber yard and bought wood and everything to make saw horses and a 4x8 layout. i credit my friends dad for getting me started. i’ve been hooked now for the last year. i can’t believe how much i’ve bought in the last year for this hobby.
I asked for a train set for Christmas when I was like six or seven. I’m not sure what caused this, but I suspect that it was that I lived in western Pennsylvania and its pretty hard to go more than five miles in any direction and not see tracks. At the time, my paternal grandfather still worked for Burlington Northern in Fort Worth and he sent me an engineer’s hat with the BN logo on the front. I also have a pin that was some kind of safety award from 1986, a giant lock with BN engraved in it, and a orange lantern that has the logo and says Burlington Northern on it that I think I was given at the same time. My dad encouraged it (being an N scale model railroader in his days before kids) and the Christmas I was to receive my trainset, I unwrapped the box the set came in and my dad took me downstairs, along with a couple other things for a layout. Down there was a simple 4x4 table with the track already laid on it. Some structures were assembled (he rightly assumed the amount of patience you could get out of a six year old assembling a building). One of the things I got that christmas was a caboose with a working spotlight from my grandparents in Texas. I later did a horrible job of weathering it when I was probably 13, which I really regretted years later.
I played with my train for years and years (two years years seemed longer back then) and then my brother got a set and his 4x4 was joined beside mine. For a couple years it was a playset for us children and all sorts of toys. At the age of eight years and nine months, I had to have surgery for something. As a get well present, my parents got me an issue of RMC. I suspect the cover might have been more interesting that month, else I would have a giant pile of MR instead of RMC back home. I was fascinated by the things I saw in that magazine.
We started to get older (I think I was all of 10) and the old twin loops had bored my brother and I. My dad called me from work one day to pull up the track and clean everything off
Now this is REALLY interesting topic and I have read all those that have posted before and found them A-1. Now, when I tell you my story, I’m sure that many will say - YEAH-SURE, but I swear (on the Good Book - NOT cursing) that it is true. My love of railroads and trains started IN THE WOMB!!! Keep reading, it’s true - my Mother, bless her soul, when she was carrying me, just HAD to go down to a bridge over the Boston & Maine railroad in Waltham, MASS. and let the smoke from the evening passenger train envelope her as it went under the bridge and working hard with an uphill pull. Well, once I was born, my Dad tells me that I only smiled when I saw a train, and for nothing else. I have been a train fanatic ever since I can remember. Even the Doctor who took care of me in my early years admitted that Mom must have “marked” me. Even after shovelling 12 tons of coal into a handbomber on some pedler freights that I worked, I still went home, took a shower, had a bite to eat and went downstairs to work on the layout, - THAT’s being really obsessed with trains. I’m 67 years of age, retired AND still nuts about trains.
Norman Guinard
In my previous message I stated that Mom went to the B&M bridge to be enveloped in smoke - I forgot to say that she went EVERY DAY of her pregnancy for me. Every day, for about 7 months straight - I guess that should mark anyone!
Norman Guinard
Lionel trains (0&HO) recieved as presents in the early 60’s as a child. Took first steps at Model Railroading about 1970 when I bought some Atlas and Arnold Rapido N trains.
Been modeling in N and operating O hirail off and on ever since.
Much like your story, My background was an American Flyer train-set and I walked into a so called general hobby shop in 1968 . I asked about the N scale trains they had for sale, and even though they were great looking, they seemed to be too small for me to work with. I knew about HO scale and asked if it was still available. I was told a few people still worked with HO scale, but N was very popular and basically, that is what they sold.
A few months later, I was moved to St. Louis on a new contract by my company and visited a Trains only Hobby shop that is long gone today. He had about thirty PFM engines on the glass shelves, and I paid him $64.95 for my first NKP Berkshire, plus ten dollars more to paint it for me.
Now I have to tell you, that paint was worth ten dollars but not much more. Today, it is still in my collection with a little weathering and looks fairly good. I would not to part with the
In 1962, at the age of 4, I was in the attic of my grandmother’s house in Durant, Oklahoma. Her house faced onto Arkansas street which paralled the Frisco’s Ardmore-Arkinda sub-division. As I stood in one of the attic’s dormer windows a quartet of Frisco GP-7’s rolled past ( It was 8 years later that I learned what model the engines were, at 4 I just thought they were the neatest thing I’d ever seen. ) I remember reaching out and pretending that my hand was big enough to pick up one of the cars as they rolled past.
Eventually I nagged my dad into giving me my older brother’s Lionel set, then in 1969 for christmas my parents gave me a Tyco HO set.
The rest is history, 35 years later and I’m collecting equipment for the day when the kids move out and there is room for me to build a layout. One of the kids, my middle boy, wants to move out so he will have room for the N Scale layout he wants to build.
I started with Lionel HO when I was 4, and ran it around a 4x4, then 4x6, and finally a 4x8 layout, but it was still thought of as a toy. Other engines came as the years progressed (Dad got tired of replacing rubber bands) but things changed when I was 10.
We had moved into a new house and my Dad, who spent most of his time at work, took some time off to spend with me. He bought a Mantua 4-6-2 Pacific kit, and we spent many hours fitting and testing parts, pickling the metal parts and teaching me to paint. With that engine kit complete I tackled a “big six” Tyco kit, with a little help from Dad and I was hooked.
I still have those engines, displayed proudly in a case, and even though my Dad now has Altzheimers and can’t remember what he had for breakfast, everytime he visits and sees the engines, he clearly remembers the hours we spent building them.
And I do too![^]
Older sister had an Eldon 1/32 scale slot car set. Soon discovered LHS with
commercial track. Dad & me start building & running cars at LHS and in basement.
LHS closes, we got a half dozen cars with no place to run them. Build our own
track in the basement does not occur to us. Continue to run 1/32 and HO cars
occasionally.
Tyco releases “Spirit of 76” set. I want one! Dad happy to comply. Dad discovers
Model Railroader mag at library.
Dad dies just before I turn 13. Lose interest in trains for about 7 years, had to
concentrate on school.
Out of school, start to play with trains again for a few years, gradually lose
interest to race cars(real ones this time). Build & pit crew friends cars through
1999 season. Friend/driver/car owner dies early 2000. I’m back in the
grandstand.
Mid 2003: new co-worker brings in pictures of his N scale layout. Then he gives
me all his old railroad mags. Soon decide I gotta get my trains running again
and build a layout that I really like and FINISH it.
And when I finish it…I’m gonna finally build a slot car track for my
1/24th scale cars! [}:)]
Why I decided to become a model railroader, hmmmmmmmmmm…
When I decided that it sure as hell beats sitting around watching the grass grow, the car rust, the kids growing up and the wife getting fat!
Seriously, I think what really made me decide to get serious was when we moved to our new house in another state and I discovered a box packed away from our old garage that contained a good amount of HO scale tracks, locos, rolling stock and magazines I had from when I was a teenager. Before I got married, (I was 20) I had a simple 4’ X 8’ layout in my parent’s basement. Nothing extravigant, just a simple oval track with a few sidings. When I moved out, my parents dismantled it and boxed it. How it ended up in my old garage beats me. When we were unpacking in the new house 18 yrs later, I found the box. I opened it and all the memories of spending many nights in the cellar building and running the trains came back. I started reading the magazines, bought new ones, and soon, I was building a new more sophisticated and bigger lay-out. My son who is only 4 loves trains and is always wanting to help me or play with the traains. Hopefully, he will continue to hold an interest in the hobby as he gets older. (As far as the wife getting fat? Well, she is as good looking as she was the day we met, and only 10 pounds heavier (135lbs) than when we met, even after 3 kids!)
When I was 4 years old my father gave me a wooden model of an electric MU train like the ones that were at that time the most modern passenger trains in the Netherlands.
I must have have model railroading in my genes because since that moment it has been my one and only hobby and we are talking of 64 years.