Was thinking today while doing some outside work Yeah there s life other then trains unfortunately about my return back into the hobby. My reason aka my excuse as the wife calls it was after my son was born I wanted a hobby we both could share. Well he loves cars and trucks etc. like most little boys do but he sure loves trains. I don’t think I’m totally to blame for that as Thomas might have had some influence on him as well.
I know some of you started in the hobby and never left which in hindsight I should have done but I see all the time posters coming back in to the hobby after a long off or some even just getting started for the first time. So what got you interested in model railroading weather your a newbie or a reborn model railroader or an old timer who never left.
It was my father, who got me into the hobby. When I was a little boy, my father used to take my brother and me to the train station on a Saturday morning, while my mother and my older sister stayed at home, cleaning the house. In those days, there was still a lot of steam to be seen and admired. My father himself never had a layout of his own - he had received his Marklin “starter set” at the outbreak of WW II and had to leave it behind, when the Red Army rolled over his hometown. Christmas 1963 I received my Marklin starter set and stayed with the hobby ever since. There were times I was reduced to being an armchair modeler, but since a little over 20 years now, I am back to active duty!
My grandfather got me into the hobby when I was 4. We had an oval set up on a piece of plywood in the living room and we would set and watch it go around for what seemed like hours back then…I even have a picture of us having one of our op sessions somewhere in this rat’s nest of a desk…
Probably a typical story for a lot of members of my generation. I guess I was in my mid 20’s, cleaning out the attic of the family home, when I came upon a couple of cardboard boxes filled with the Lionel train set and accessories that my father had bought for my brothers and I back in the mid 50’s. It changed my life! I cleaned them up, and soon began a love for this hobby that has lasted for 30 plus years. After dabbling in O scale for awhile, I soon decided that HO was the way to go. I still have that Lionel set, looking almost as good as new. It’s just waiting for my newborn grandson to get just a wee bit older!
I was out of work at the time and I was bored. When I was around 25 a friend and I got into HO slot cars, I moved and keep the slot car set. One day I was out in the garage I was looking for something to do and dragged out the slot car set and sat it up in the family room.
I then started looking for scrap lumber and built a bench in the garage. I all so joined a on line HO slot car site chat room and bought more track, was up to around 250 feet. While on E-Bay looking for HO scale trees and buildings I came across some cheap Life Like model train sets. Bought tow sets for $75.00 and I was hooked. I got my first train set at age 49!
All so when I was 5 or so I was living with my Grandfather and his house over looked the B&O yard in Washington IND. I was so tickled when a Santa Fee warbonnet would roll into the yard. My uncle Harry all so had a Lionel O gauge layout that I loved to watch run.
So the seeds where all ready there when I came across the cheap train set on E-Bay.
As a kid in the 1950s, I had two American Flyer trains. Stored them away in a box when I went to college, then got married and raised a family.
Seven years ago, I returned to the hobby, this time going the HO route. Today, I have a pretty nice landscaped layout.
This past Christmas, my brother-in-law, showed me his old Lionel trains. That inspired me to get my old American Flyer trains out of storage. I am now in the process of restoring and rehabbing my old American Flyer trains and a modest layout.
On this Easter Sunday, please keep me in your prayers so that I am able to resist turning a small 8’ x 8’ S scale oval layout into a monster layout that will consume the rest of my basement and lead to Divorce Court.
Taking the Shaker Rapid (PCC cars even) to Cleveland Union Terminal. My grandfather worked there as a custodian and it was/is a major stop for the Rapid. Sometimes we would go to Higbees on Public Square but most times my grandmother and I would change trains to go to the West Side Market. Alas by the time I was going through there was no more passenger trains but the tracks were still there. 30 some tracks IIRC. Most of the tracks are gone now but the marble concourse still remains.
I started my model carreer about age 5 with an HO train set on the typical 4x8 which grew to 12x12 before a move required disassembly. Several years later I was working on a 4x16 which again got torn down for a move and rebuilt as another 4x16. That gave way to my current project, an ill fated 16x20 walkaround. It too will be torn down due to lack of operational abilities but I’ll use it as a learing experience for trackwork and scenery. FWIW I’ve gotten very good at salvaging track and such so I still have a good portion of my original equipment.
I had O-O/27 as a kid and teen. also in my teen years I picked up some N scale someone moving was throwing out. fast forward 25 years or so and a local Auction House nearby me had a big sign out for train sale…so we went in and looked around. Nothing we were interested in as all old stuff…but got me thinking about my old N scale stuff. My other half has a thing for trains as well and wanted N scale. I wanted HO scale this time.
The rest is history so to speak. Only we live in a trailer and I forced a space issue to have a small HO layout that no longer fits in the room it is in and needs to be taken down. There is no room for my other half’s N scale either, so down must come the HO until we buy a “modeling space with a house over it”
We do have a small layout for table top under-the-tree to keep us semi happy and running trains, even in only in a circle for about a month!
"On this Easter Sunday, please keep me in your prayers so that I am able to resist turning a small 8’ x 8’ S scale oval layout into a monster layout that will consume the rest of my basement and lead to Divorce Court."
Sure we’ll all pray that you get a judge who is a model railroader no problem
What got me into the hobby? Well, as far back as I can remember I had always been absolutely ga-ga for trains. My very first electric set, gotten for Christmas of 1964 (there were several battery/wind up sets before that) was a set made by Marklin with a Santa Fe E7-A and E7-B with a boxcar, auto carrier, gondola with container canisters and a caboose. The track was the run of the mill 3-rail 0-27 type.
Santa brought me a Penn Line set in 1963 when I was seven. My dad and I built a basic oval on a 4’X8’ sheet of plywood. When I hit my teens, I lost interest but took it up a few years ago in order have a hobby when I eventually retire. Since then, I’ve joined a local club and the NMRA. I’ve learned a ton from the folks, in my club as well as reading this and other forums, “Model Railroader” and the NMRA’s “Scale Rails”. I plan to build my own layout when we build our retirement home so my only operating takes place at my club or as a guest at a home layout. I enjoy the comraderie of belonging to a club and will most likely will still belong to one after I build my own layout.
Well it all started with an idea for a train under the Christmas tree and a trip to what was then a LHS (Orange Blossom in Miami). Now its a whole town that fills up most of the garage. No complaints though it is still the best hobby with the freindliest people I know.
Suprizingly enough, what got me into the hobby was accually a flatcar in a model trainset that was designed to dump it’s pipe load into a small bin that was to be placed trackside. I purchaced the trainset from an estate sale for $10.00 and it included a Life Like set with 2 switches, a GP 38-2, 10 railcars (including the one described above), some freaght stations, and three small buildings.
After getting home, I went out to our back room (then it had a concrete floor) and pushed all of the tables, chairs, and other furniture pieces and went to work. Naturally, as most children wanted, I started on a miniature world that had a train yard (like I passed when my family went to Georgia on Highway 301; which I would come to know as CSX’s Baldwin Yard and a prime spot for rail-fan trips with my dad)and a doubble track mainline with 2 trains going in opposite directions.
Well; as my creative mind went to work, I quickly used up the two switches for the yard, and laid out a huge ( I mean going from 1 wall to the other the long way) oval loop with the extra curving sections along one side of the oval, and a long, strait mainline, with a (useless, but cool) trestle about half the distance. I liked the mainline because I could get my dad’s camera and place it trackside and get nice photos of that Chessie GP38-2 hauling trains as long as 25-30 cars long,untill it got to those realitively small radius curves.
That was when the railroading bug bit me hard, but it was when I got my first issue of Model Railroader that the ball got rolling for me to build a layout. Unfortunately, the first article I saw was Pelle Soberg’s article on how to build the Donner River pass, and , of course, I got high hopes for building a layout like what I saw in the article. (after reading the article, I filled out the subscription card, gave it to my mom to mail off, and went to work, using shoeboxes to build a “mountain” for the
I’ve just loved trains since I was born. in fact a couple of my first memories I can remember is getting a wooden figure 8 Thomas set with a Thomas, milk tanker, caboose, and bridge when I was maybe three (?), visiting a real steam locomotive and playing with a wooden steam engine. I loved Thomas all through childhood and then got a few HO sets which didn’t catch. then I bought an Iron Duke N scale set from Bachmann when I was 8 and got hooked. and now 7 years later (I’m 15) I’m building my N scale Aiken Northern North Branch railroad. I just loved trains since I was born, have no idea why. My dad was in the Navy, never worked for a railroad, nor his parents or my mom or her parents.
My wife got me started. When she was pregnant with our first child, I jokingly told her the baby would have a train for his/her first Christmas. This is what my Dad had done for my first Christmas - although the train was long gone before I could remember it. So my wife jumped the gun and bought a train set the Christmas she was pregnant. I discovered a copy of MR on the PX newstand the day after that Christmas and have been hooked ever since. This was in 1971.
My great uncle (and namesake) Thomas Gregory, when I was about 5, back in the mid-'forties. He was a fireman on the Southern Pacific and worked the helpers between Truckee and Norden on the SP Donner Pass line. He’d already ‘infected’ my older cousin Richard, so one day Richard took me to Truckee, Uncle Tom sneaked us aboard the locomotive and we both rode the helper locomotive between Truckee and Norden (it was an AC-6 4-8-8-2 cab forward). That was my first train experience, and after that I was hopelessly hooked. (My cousin Dick always joked that I was so excited that I wet my pants.).
My introduction to HO was when I was in high school in the 1950’s and a buddy of mine on the track team had some HO ‘stuff’ he wanted to get rid of. For the exhorbiant amount of $5, I acquired about three metal Athearn freight cars, 2 Silver Streak wooden freight cars and an Ulrich metal gondola. After that, it was full speed ahead. Oddly enough, except for the Ulrich metal gondola, I still have all of the freight cars. And yah, they’re still running on the Yuba River Sub.
I contracted the train bug on Christmas Day, 1945. We were visiting my grandfather in Jackson, Tenn., and my Dad had just returned from Germany where he had served with the Army Signal Corps. With him he had brought back a large No.1 gauge Marklin electric train set (vintage mid-to-late 1930s). He and my grandfather spent all night Christmas Eve getting it set up in the dining room. It covered most pf the room, and he didn’t even use all of the track. On Christmas morning, I came out and went completely bonkers. I wouldn’t even eat Christmas dinner that day. By the end of the day, I could operate that layout like I was three times my age (3 1/2 yrs) and knew all there was to know about it from an operator’s point of view. I still have the train, BTW, and it still runs!
I fell in love with HO back in the 1950s, when I visited the HO layout of a friend’s uncle, and he had a Varney Lil’ Joe 0-4-0 Docksider, with full valve gear and all. About 1954, or thereabouts, I sent in 3 Kix boxtops and $3 to General Mills, and got a Varney boxcar, gondola, and caboose, along with a dummy F3 locomotive. Of course, the first thing I had to do was to get a power conversion kit so I could run that snazzy new diesel. I laid an oval out on a sheet of Celotex, and I was in business, and never looked back.
There have since been a couple of periods where I was unable to have any model rr stuff, but I never considered actually leaving the hobby - it was just on hold for awhile.
I don’t like trains. Never did. I always would stop and look when I’d see one further cementing my dislike. Then in about 1971 or 2, I recieved an AHM train set with no real place to put it up. Still, I did many times. Learning then, I dislike model trains even more than big ones. I was allowed then to set up a 4X8 and I started with no money and relying on gifts and the kindness of my parents to finance along with garage sale TYCO equipment. The stuff made me want nothing more to do with trains. Then in about '74, a neighbor down the road gave me a stack of Model Railroader and what I believe was called Railroad Modeller magazines. (been a loooong time) After seeing what the possibilities were, I wiped the drool off my magazines and decided I really couldn’t stand trains. Drivers license and jobs and wife and kids came along as well as a house with a basement so I could set aside a place for my future shrine to how I disliked trains. Maybe one of those big ugly ones I recalled from my youth out of spite. That empty space remaind until a couple of years ago, while emptying my Mothers house, I found leaning against the wall in the garage, behind some sheets of paneling, my old layout. Paper grass and all. A few broken buildings, but still there.I had to remove it so it came home with me along with all the memories of my former dislikes and dreams. Did it work? I didn’t know and didn’t want too. The nightmare had returned. Then in her basement I found a box of my old locos and cars and a the rest of the buildings. I had to know, I cleaned it up, pluggd it in and found none of the TYCOs ran, but the AHM buzzed to life and ground around the track sounding like a cross between a shorted out electric motor and fingernails across a screen. Just like new. I added on to this disaster and learned a few things. Now, I’m building another layout to prove just how much I dislike this hobby and someday there will be a layout I can proudly say I can’t stand. &
About 51 years ago my older brother had an MB Austin catalog of brass locomotives. He said he would be asking for an HO locomotive, some cars, and track for Christmas. So, I did the same. Got a painted 0-4-0 Camelback, three or four freight cars, and a loop of snap track. My Dad still asks if I’m “fooling” around with trains still.