This is some great stuff here, I can feel the excitement reading the posts of everyones experiances, and the video link to the Christmas Train is a must see, and good old Wayne Newton opening with that song brought back a lot of good memories. not about Christmas as I have celebrated my first one this past December because we now have grandkids who are from mixed parents, the father is 1/2 Mexican and Anglo so we wanted to show them both Christmas and the Native celebration of the Winter Gathering, it was great and I will be celebrating Christmas with them every year after this one, to see the excitement in their faces was priceless.
The Wayne Newton song brought back memories of my Mother who liked him and Elvis, she use to have a big heavy Elvis bust that we used to hold open the door, now that was scary to see watching me at night as I tried to fall asleep, I use to throw a blanket over his head [swg]
A lot of peoples first experiances were at the Christmas day celebration and that is cool.
I love the one about the Grandfathers scary basement, I can’t stop laughing over that image [(-D]
So many good stories!
Thanks for brightening up my day, they are all wonderful.
Iwas 11 years old and me and my father set up a little 3X6 layout in the garage. It wasn’t much but we had alot fun with it. Still got it today. The train that is.[swg]
1976 christmas, received a new tyco spirit of 76 set. 6 axel no less. 5 cars ?? 1 caboose. Set it up on the floor. ran it for everyone. Thats when I learned my paternal grandfather worked for a ralroad ( dont remember which road, but ould have been in stl) he was a carpenter which made him awesome to me but when i learned about the RR, he became a God!
thats when tyco was tyco and still made a good product ( for tyco that is) my mom worked at a major discount retailer,since gone out of business (Venture) so we also got a bunch more cars and engines that were returned by customers, and were too expensive to ship back to the vendor, so she got destroy orders (but didnt destroy them) my dad also got interested and bought a bunch of cars and turnouts on fridays. then he would have us set up the track on saturdays and he would watch us run it. he had trouble understanding that we had to many cars and needed more track but when we could run the engine into the caboose he would buy more track.
Sadly, some time later my matrnal grandmother made a snide comment to my dad about finally showing interest and that was the end of that.
then my older half brother sold the set for drug money, mid 1980"s was the last i saw that set. We had about 7 engines and 50 cars, track, turnouts. he got about $20
would love to have that set now, have seen some spirit engines but not in good shape. have the good memories that outweigh the bad, evidentaly so cause im still a model RRer
(when asked why i have a model RR I say its because my wife wont let me have a real RR)
Mine was the Golden Eagle. Also had Nite-Glow. I still remember running it on the floor, and also how frustrated my dad got trying to put cars on the rails. I remember some comparisons were made with his childhood Lionel set, none too favorably, and perhaps the next year or a couple years later a Lionel set did indeed appear - the 4-4-0-hauled “Redwood Valley” logging set. This actually turned into a for-real model railroad (the previous HO set never did) and was set up on a 4x8. Never got any scenery, but I did build a rather overscale working derrick out of wood scraps. But that petered out too, maybe because the Lionel equipment was just too expensive,and HO scale ended up sticking after all, when my brother & I put together a table with his Tyco GP20 set and just kept adding equipment, real estate, and structures until the spiders didn’t know where to spin webs first. He eventually got bored with the hobby; I stayed. He’ll be back in a few years, though, count on it.
31 years ago. My parents found a lionel set in the attic and set it up on the floor. I came home from my friends house and they had just finished setting it up and let me run the train. Although they seemed huge at the time, but it was a SW 7 or 1200 ect… an open hopper, 2 boxcars and a caboose. The set disappeared after that. But then I got my first HO set that Christmas.
I cannot however remember what happened last week.
The ironic thing now is that some of our original Tyco products might be “Collectible”. But it was fun back then. My brother had the Spirit of 76 engine, I still have the shell some place and my Silver Streak I believe, sadly I was ignorant at the time and used some for paint or detail test beds.
I guess many of us got a similar start in this hobby, just went on from there.
They do have their following. Fortunately they are more of a “Hey, that’s neat, I had one of those” collectible at this point, rather than a “RARE L@@K MINT MISB C10 $$$$ !!!1!!!” collectible, though I suppose there are some rare pieces, but not many. I bought a Silver Streak C420 and matching caboose at the last train show for $3, just for the heck of it.
