RELAPSE!!! I never could get rid of it.[:P] It started at 6 year old with a old Tyco HO train set.[yeah] It was a Tyco train set and yes I still have it and IT STILL RUNS!!![wow][bow] That old F-7A still pull a car or two. My virus quadroopled about 17 years ago.[banghead] Its a thing that just doesn’t go away.[swg]
027 Lionel in either 1950 or 51. took two hands to hold the engine of course I was only 4 or 5. Picked up HO in 1970 or 71 and still there. Phil
I got the virus when I was 5 yrs. old in 1954. My Dad used to take my brother and I to the B&O mainline in Martinsburg W.Virginia and park along the tracks. The mallets pulling the coal trains where amazing. The smoke and cinders would fly and we would laugh, the first diesels we saw we were afraid of at that time. They just didn’t sound and look right to us. I also fell in love with the I-12 Wagon Top cabooses, they were a welcome sight bringing up the rear of the trains. Jim[:)]
i was raised watching thomas the tank engine, and could hum the themesong before i could count to three.I still think the thomas the tank engine layout is one of the best layouts there is. the skarloey railway was the best.
I got infected with the train virus in 1964 when I got a big Lionel train set. Unlike bactreia, you can never get rid of a virus. The virus I got has multiplied exponentially and mutated into a Large Scale, narrow gauge type with detail-oriented genomes and some remnants of an On30 protein shell.
I had a Lionel set as a kid but to my pappy it was a toy and we never did anything with it; by the time I was an adult I had lost complete and total interest in it.
Then, in May, 1962 the Air Force (read: SAC) sent me to Vandenburg AFB in California for a four week specialized computer maintenance training course - being 22 and still a little on the wild side I took along 4 weeks of partying money - and I did - then they extended (read: stranded) me for another three weeks to act as an observer for a missile shoot. Was out of partying money so got myself two cartons of cigarettes to tide me over for the three weeks and went by the exchange to get me some reading material. Picked up two or three pocket books and guess what else I bought at the newstand?
Don’t remember the names of the pocket books; don’t remember whether I ever even read them or not; do know that I read the July, '62 MR and RMC; read them - and read them - and read them. They are temporarily residing in a storage box in my train room while I go through a sorting and reorganization operation.
The AF ultimately cancelled one of the weeks of my extended TDY and ordered me home to my regular duty station in Washington state. Had I have known my TDY was only going to be two weeks in length I would probably have contented myself with the pocket books - and I probably wouldn’t be up here on the forum right now.
I was always highly suceptable to the train bug.
When I was two years old. Dad took me down to the old train depot and we stood on the platform and watched trains go bye.
we stood right near the yellow line, and the train came through doing about 50 (or so he says. I was to young to remember) and instead of being scared and wanting to go home. I was utterly facinated.
Then when I was 4. he brought two bachmann sets home from work. And the rest is history Now I have 120 locomotives. over 600 cars and more track and buildings than I can use at the moment.
James
I was born with the train virus!
My great great grand father was a depot master for the L&A, my grand father owned a timber company and hauled pulpwood via rail, and my dad and I built an HO layout when I was growing up. There is no cure in sight for me…
I survived many smal exposures. Dad’s Lionel set. Riding down Eastern Avenue as a kid looking down into Cincinnati Union Terminal yards. My Grandmother taking me to the Cincinnati Gas & Electric train display at Christmas. The real trains at Chicago’s Museam of Science & Industry when I was ten. An HO 4X8 set up I shared with my little brothers. I though I was resistant until I took my Grandaughter to the Christmas Train display two years ago. I have been hooked ever since.
this is great we all have somthing that sparked this outbreak
hope I never get cured
K
A visit to Tuscola,IL when I was 5. Those Chessie locos had an effect on me!
I caught it when my family moved to a neighbourhood near some light industrial trackage. I was twelve years old at the time. As soon as I had my first taste of railfanning I was hooked.
its like I’m on the internet and all of a sudden whamo relaps
I pick up parts you just never know
it just hits ya
K
I got my virus when I went to my local hobby shop to get another car model and Reg Baxter (the owner) suggested that I try model railroading. He said I could make models that did something. Walked out with my first, a custom painted CP RS2 (brass, how’s that for a first step [:O] ) and have not looked back. That was 1979.
1944, I was 4 years old, folks bought me a prewar American Flyer “O” gauge Hudson, 3 lighted passenger cars and a light tower for Christmas. I remember it like it was yesterday. The Hudson still runs.
Dick
Texas Chief
Hmmm, Grandpa was MoW for the B&O, and a great-great something-or-another on the other side was a track walker for the Pennsy (He got paid to actually walk the track looking for trouble way back whenever) So maybe there is something to the genetic thing. Grandpa also had thousands tied up in Lionel trains (grandma still has them all), Dad had a bunch of Flyer, I was given a Fisher-Price loco before I could walk. I got a used marx set when I was about 8 (still in mom’s basement I think) Then a tyco HO set at 10 (destroyed that by sending it off the table at 600 scale MPH too many times!). As an adult I did N for a while, now I play with LGB.
Somewhere Mom and Grandma have old pix of me trying to “help” build a temporary 15" gauge track when i was about 6 too.
In my family. I was the only one who started likeing Trains. Now im opessed.
I had those plastic battery-operated toy trains since as far back as I can remember…
But then, for my 5th birthday I got a “real” trainset - an HO scale B’mann somethingorother… that lasted for a while, but then I ended up downsizing to N scale because I had no space of my own.
Went to the Div IV NMRA show a few weeks ago, mostly for fun and to look at the layouts… BUT the Train Bug had other ideas… and I relapsed… HARD [:)].
It’s a good thing that there were no places that took CC (that were selling HO stuff)… I felt like a kid in a candy store… I wanted to buy everything (well, every steamer…)
1964, I was 4 years old. I got a Lionel double diesel train set for christmas. The bug bit hard and never let go.
Growing up in Southeastern Pennsylvania in the shadow of the Standard Railroad of the World, you litterally could not turn around without seeing something to do with trains. In grade school our window looked out across a field on the otherside of which was a branchline. Every day about 2 PM or so, a Reading switcher would trundle past with a handful of cars.
In the summer there were the family Sunday outings to the Strasburg Railroad and dinner at the Dutch Haven Resturant. In the winter there was the 4x8 HO layout that spent the summer on the wall of the garage which would be set up in the family room until sometime after the new year. It was just two loops of track with no sidings but it did have two train control. The inner loop was my brother’s the outer loop was mine! LOL
The seeds had been planted…
Then, in the early eighties, I walked into a hobby shop and on a whim picked up a copy of MR, and, as the saying goes, that was all she wrote!
-George