Who else besides me remembers HO modeling in the 1950’s & 1960’s ?
What I wouldn’t have done or given for any of the models we have today.
My first kit was a wood box car that was litterally a few pieces of wood and
a decal sheet for C&NW. No airbrushes. You painted by hand brush and thought it looked good. Only dummy couplers. Trucks had to be assembled from many parts including the coil springs which could easily fly away when putting them in the side frames. But HO looked sooooo coooool to a 12 year old who had out grown his Lionel.
Ray--------Great Northern fan.
That’s a little before my time. I do remember the 70’s. Still run some of my old equipment with my son on our current railroad.
Yes, and you learned to model with wood within given tollerances, how to carefully follow detailed instructions, to perfect your model painting and decaling abilities, and ended up with something you created by your own skills from very basic materials and you treasured it.
However, today you fork over $40, open a box and put a car assembled by some guy in China on the rails…personally accomplishing absolutely zero in the process! Has the hobby advanced or digressed?
CNJ831
That was my era. I got an English Yard Bird with valve gear kit. I still have most of it. Laid brass track on Tru scale road bed. Was trying to model an iron mine in Northern Minnesota that was near my Gparents cabin. Started Model Railroader Mag in 1945. Talked about all their people being off to war and no materials for models. First cars were ore cars from DMIR. Still have the memories and the new layout is trying to keep them going. Love my new BL, sounds just like I remember as a kid. I would love to hear what others remember from those wild times. Art
Hi, Ray.
Although I’m not old enough to remember the 50s, being born in '59, I still
revere craftsmanship and am permanently into building kits-as opposed to
RTR. While there are many wonderful products available in RTR, (some of which
I own-the Genesis GN PC&F 200000 series cars are beautiful!) I still get more
fulfillment out of assemblinga kit or doing a kitbash, then giving them an
individual paint and weathering job. So, I guess I’m more old fashioned than
not-I also like GN steam-wish I could have seen it in action. I definitely under-
stand your reminesces. Have a great day.
Art, it’s awesome that you’ve been in the hobby so long. God bless you sir.
The Old Dog can’t say it did much real modeling in the period. But it spent many an hour reading MR and RMC,
The Dog is beginning to think that the old wood kits were better. Paper sides! Get a computer colour printer and some some software and you can get your sides from anything available on the web or that can be scanned in.
If anybody still makes them, they have a customer.
The Old Dog has been going thru its old MR’s and RMC’s looking for ineresting “stuff”. Most such “stuff” seems to have been printed in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Have fun
Yep, remember it well. First layout was built with fiber tie and brass rail flex track spiked down on cork roadbed nailed down to plywood. my rolling stock was mostly Mantua with those Mantua loop-hook couplers. I remember some wood kits that included a small paper envelope containg a glue powder you mixed with water for assembly. That milled wood road bed was a bit rich for a farm boy to buy. 15" curves on a 4X8 plywood table, a 9 dollar Mantua 0-4-0 shifter, a few freight cars and man, I was railroad’n. Back then locos had rhynestone jewels for headlights and classification lights. Sometimes I’d lay in bed at night and just dream of the day I’d have whole room full of trains and 50 some years later I’m still dreaming the same thing. Oh well, someday!!! [(-D][(-D][(-D]
I started in HO in 1952. I remember the loop couplers that Eriediamond mentioned. I still have afew of them. You uncupoled them by using a curved piece of celluloid between the rails–like a Kadee magnet of today. I used to have some Laconia boxcars & reefrs. The reefers were printed foil sides. The one I had was Chateaue Martin Wines --Purple in colour. My first loco was a Varney Dockside 040. It is still running on my RR today.
Tom
I still have two MDC and Tyco cast metal steam locomotives that were assembled from unpainted kits in the early 1960’s, and they both still run. One is an 0-6-0 switcher with a slope back tender (MDC) and the other is an 0-4-0T (Tyco). The boilers and frames on both were bare white metal castings that didn’t even have holes drilled for the add-on parts such as the whistle and hand railings.
I barely remember the '50s modelling wise, but I remember the prototypes pretty well.
If, I say again IF, you want to build everything from scratch, there’s nothing to stop you, but the incresed availability of highly detailed good running equipment, whether RTR or shake the box ‘plus’ kits has greatly added to my enjoyment.
I do wonder if they couldn’t lower the pricing on steam engines if they offered them unassembled. I would really enjoy putting one of those together without having to file crummy castings. But, I suspect the manufacturers know they would get inundated the first time someone was assembling a 2-10-10-2 and tab A didn’t fit perfectly into slot B on the first try. I believe the expectations of most consumers had led us to where we are. We are well into the age of plug and play, so we may as well get used to it.
I got into the hobby in the late 60’s. I remember the fiber tie flex-track and brass rail. I saved my allowance to buy one three-foot section of nickel-silver flex-track with plastic ties (just coming out) each week for 75 cents at the LHS. My layout was in the basement. I always worked with music playing. When I hear certain songs today, I’m transported right back there, having a great time for very little money.
When I was in college, I sold nearly all my accumulated equipment - I thought I was done with the hobby. I sure regret that now - not for the detailed fidelity of the equipment (old Athearn, Tyco, Mantua, etc.), but for the memories I can no longer reach out and touch.
I boxed up all those memories when I moved out of the family home in the early 70’s, and earlier this year I opened the boxes and let them all out again. Yesterday I was installing Kadee #5’s in an old Athearn belt-drive GP-9 (Milwaukee Road) and I pulled the old headlight out, since it will get a LED one of these days. The mount for the headlight was one of those old loop-hook couplers, bent and glued to the roof of the engine shell.
I was a teenager then, and I didn’t scratch-build very much. Wood kits were way out of my league, but I built some of my rolling stock from plastic kits. Now, I’ve got more patience and I’m discovering the joys of spending a few hours just to get one little detail right.
I remember Ray, I earned money by cuting lawns, etc. in summer, just so that I could buy a model or two. I even sliced my middle finger so bad with a double edge rasor blade that I could not straighten the lower knuckle of that finger for many years afterwood. Ohhh the tools that they have now that we never had…tsk, tsk.
Thanks for the memories Ray,
Ray,I started modeling in the 50s…My dad was a modeler and the first locomotive kit I built was a Penn-Line PRR 2-8-0…I was 10 years old.Dad told me I had to learn how to build locomotive kits so he got me that Penn-Line kit and told me to start building it…Dad did not help me but,would check on myprogress…If dad came in and just shook his head I knew I made a mistake and would find and correct the mistake before moving on to the next step.Now if Dad nodded his head I knew I was doing good.I will always be grateful to my dad for those valuable lessons.[:D]
Not quite, I started in December of 1971. But I do remember the fiber tie flex track with brass rail - it was on my first layout. Paper sides were gone by then, but NMRA printed some in their Bulletin and I built two cars with them.
Enjoy
Paul
I remember those tiny springs in the trucks, and the “amazing flying springs” in the old Kadee #4s. I bought some HO in 1957 and found out I had very limited skills. It’s 48 years later and I still have limited skills compared to some of my “heros” in the hobby. I can handlay track now (but I don’t-not enough time available), I have a lot more patience with couple installations and I’m an old hand at decoder installations now, but I look at Allen McClellend’s work or Chuck Hitchcock’s modeling and I realize I still have very limited skills.
Ed
I started in the early '60s. By then Athearn had blue boxes. MDC was a little more complex. I have a little different spin from most of the above. I’m tickled to death at the highly detailed models available today.
Yeah, I have the time and patience now to assemble a good kit. But (not being all that talented mechnaically) I find the new stuff absolutely amazing in the amount of detail. I just saw my first Kadee hopper car the other day. What a beautiful model.
When I lay track now, it works. I used the brass track with fiber ties. I even used the Atlas (?) switch kits with fiber ties. I couldn’t afford spikes so I glued many of them. Needless to say, performance was less than stellar.
I remember when my wife and I moved into our first house, I built some laughable benchwork made out of lath because that was all I could afford.
The short version is that, while I enjoyed trains in the '60s, it’s so much better now.
Tom
Stopping up sinks with hydrocal, 99 cent plastic cars, scratchbuilding with balsa wood, wanting to be John Allen when I could avoid growing up…
Ray,
Remember those days well. Fibre tie strips with brass rail laid on cork roadbed. Still have a couple of Atlas switch kits(new in box?) I never used. Had a few Mantua cars with the Mantua style couplers that I changed out for X2Fs in the early 60’s (they now have Kadee’s)and my first kit was an Ulrich stock car. I saved my weekly allowance and would buy a Varney kit and work on it dreaming of my huge fleet I would someday have.I bought a Globe dummy Diesel one day and was amazed. I inherited a few Varney, Red Ball, Silver Streak, and Laconia kits from a friend of mine when he passed away and keep them to remind me of my youth and the hobby’s growth. I appreciate the variety of equipment we have today but maybe that’s because I (we) learned model railroading by building the things we wanted or needed and being resourceful. Hmmm, maybe I will get out one of those old kits and recapture my youth.
Doug