You are SO right. The Great Depression was a cataclysm (I know of no better way to describe it) that cast a LONG shadow, not just on those who lived through it but on the Boomer generation that followed it, and I’m one of them.
And to get back to a trains theme:
"Once I had a railroad, made it run, made it race against time.
“Once I had a railroad, now it’s done. Brother can you spare a dime?”
2 Likes
I see no signs of jealousy.
1 Like
“Brother, can you spare a dime?” is one of the saddest and most powerful songs I’ve ever heard or know. I hope you won’t mind a small but important detail that makes the lyric even more touching: It’s “Once I built a railroad,” etc. These guys did the work, they made America what it was.
When I was young, I knew some of these people.
The Bing Crosby recording is, to me, heart-breaking and beautiful.
Thank you Flintlock76 for mentioning it here.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrpFpdey3jA&list=RDVrpFpdey3jA&start_radio=1)
1 Like
No problem!
1 Like
My 1960 Oldsmobile 88 only got 8.
Great song that fit the times.
Another was Happy Days (are here again), the FDR campaign song . It used new lyrics set to a German pop tune, “Wochenend und Sonnenschein” https://youtu.be/wWpf43PBq8Y?si=msjKjG7vh1LkQXrV
Amazing! I had NO idea!
1 Like
Ah, the German song set new lyrics to the tune ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ which had been copyrighted a year before, in 1929…
Correction noted. Thank you.
I went back to see if there was a counterpart in German to the introductory lines, which don’t seem to be reproduced in most of the online lyrics:
“So long sad times
Go along bad times
We are rid of you at last
Howdy gay times
Cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past…”
But the German lyrics are very different, despite coming from the same people.
I’ve had several hobbies in my 71 yrs…
Guns, shooting sports
Recreational vehicles
Knife Collecting
Birding
I do not find the MRR hobby prohibitively expensive compared to others
But I’m just starting out with small DC only layout… I’m sure the cost will increase as I learn and move, maybe, to DCC
Okay, I shouldn’t have opened this can of worms. Much as I’d like to, I’m not going to argue about how much I dislike modern automobiles and how much I like older ones. Please enjoy the regularly scheduled thread, and please pardon the interruption.
I worked for our state’s revenue department, starting as a Clerk 1 and moving pretty quickly up to Examiner 1 - the highest level wage (i.e., not salaried “professional”) job at Revenue. After I’d been there about 10 years, a new commissioner put in a rule that to be promoted or hired as a professional level, you had to have a degree in Accounting, Finance, Business, or…Banking!? Since I had a liberal arts degree (political science), I didn’t qualify.
This meant that for the next 20+ years, those of us with years of knowledge and experience were stuck where we were. Our supervisors and leadworkers were kids hired right out of college with the right degree but often having never filled out their own tax return. We would try to train them but often before they got up to speed, they left for a better job in the private sector. Then we’d have to train in a new one.
That finally changed in 2025, and I was promoted to a professional level position - a couple of months before I retired.
We all get to decide how much to spend on the hobby and budget accordingly. Rule number one is to decide how much we can afford to spend on the hobby and discipline ourselves to stick to the plan. The other way to keep costs in check is to avoid frivolous purchases. It’s easy to end up buying something on a whim and realize later that it wasn’t necessary or very useful. As a young adult in the late 1970s I violated both those rules. I maxed out my credit cards buying waay more than I should have. One of my excuses was that at the time, credit card interest was deductible. The other was that inflation was running at double digit which meant the dollars I paid back were worth less than what I had borrowed. While both those things were true, it put me in a financial hole and when credit card interest ceased being deductible and inflation started comingg down in the 1980s, those excuses no longer worked at all. I had to dig out of the hole I created. I ended up getting a debt consolidation loan which I rolled over after a couple years. The rollover was a mistake which I figured out later after I went to work for a bank. It took me several years but eventually I paid off the loan and from that day forward, I never charged more on by credit card than I could pay off at the end of the month. Credit card interest is one of the biggest wastes of money there is and yet too many people accept credit card debt and interest a fact of life. That is true for everyone, not just people who spend money on model railroading.