There is a poignant story in the Wall Street Journal about past Christmas's and toy trains under the tree.
Since you need to subscribe to WSJ to see the article, try doing a Google search of "Catherine Petroski trains" and the first posting should work.
Only way for us to see it is to subscribe.
Life's hard, even harder if your stupid John Wayne
http://rtssite.shutterfly.com/
Durham, N.C.
A New Yorker and a Midwesterner, a Polish Catholic and a Scots Presbyterian, an engineer and an English major—ours has been a marriage of opposites in many ways. With the approach of Christmas, I’m reminded of one more: American Flyer and Lionel.
I was the Lionel, and lacking any brothers, my sister and I knew that the train was really Dad’s. In real life he was an engineer (not the train kind), but to children, the difference between being an engineer and being the engineer of our in-house Lionel line for a time eluded us.
While some households set aside a dedicated area in the basement or attic for a permanent train layout, in our house The Train appeared only at Christmas. A sheet of plywood painted dark green with an improvised pipe-like Christmas-tree holder at its center was the Lionel’s home turf. For 11 months of the year the “train board” stood on edge at the side of our attic; then, sometime after Thanksgiving, living-room furniture would be shuffled and Dad would bring down the train board with its affixed oval track, then the boxes marked “Train,” signaling the beginning of the annual Lionel excitement, for Lionel could be a temperamental beast.
Our minimalist train setup only had one engine—a black steam-locomotive with delicate silver-colored handrails running its length and down to the cowcatcher, and silvery rods linking the driving wheels. The Lionel had a tender that I was told did something important with the electricity that drove the train, though I never understood what. And, as I suppose nearly everyone once knew, Lionel trains run on tracks having three parallel rails. Even as a small child, I found this detail an assault to my sense of verisimilitude. Everyone knows that any real train’s track has only two rails.
Eventually our father installed a pair of manually operated switches on one of the Lionel’s straightaways and a short siding for cars out of service, briefly rendering our railroading fantasy a bit more interesting. Nevertheless, the track on our green train board remained basically the unimaginative, optimally large oval that the rectangular board could accommodate.
I well remember cautiously advancing the rheostat/throttle when I was finally allowed to “run the train,” knowing that the cantankerous Lionel could at any moment spurt forward and jump the tracks at the next corner—the ultimate humiliation.
The transformer with its control throttle was, without doubt, a hazard to life and property. Tiny wires wrapped in white, red and black insulation led from terminals on the track to the box, but the contacts got jostled and became incomplete (perhaps because of frequent train wrecks). I suspect that the transformer itself may even have been faulty, since I remember getting more than one electrical shock by touching it. Anyone who has run Lionels knows they have a unique smell, something like burning electricity, which very well may have been the case with ours.
Sometime while courting but before marriage, my husband and I happened upon the subject of model trains, though by that point in the relationship even the American Flyer/Lionel divide would not have derailed us. My disappointment lifted when I learned that my husband-to-be himself came from a mixed household. His father had first given an American Flyer to him and then later, wisely, gave his younger brother a Lionel, precluding disputes over rolling-stock ownership.
Years later, I saw old black-and-white photos of their two-system setup sharing a brotherly pair of boards arranged on two levels, creating a grade that their engines had to climb and successfully descend. With mossy trees and papier-mâché mountain tunnel, truss bridge, painted-on roads, crossings with gates, loading docks, water towers, Plasticville buildings, tiny model cars and trucks and a cast of Lilliputians—the complicated layout by the brothers Petroski had a town on one level and a farm on the other for their many engines to travel through. Nothing surprising about their both becoming engineers.
What happened to our old Lionel I have no idea, but on several Christmases my husband set up various American Flyer circuits from his train stash (for the children, of course) in our academic-gypsy homes in Austin, Texas, suburban Chicago and here in Durham, N.C. On living-room carpets, on attic floors, on platforms in basements, our kids politely played with the venerable American Flyers. Alas, neither child (even the one who became a mechanical engineer) eventually felt that model trains were competition for Pac-Man and his progeny.
Their father took it well. He packed away the American Flyer engines, cars and two-railed tracks, and during a downsizing we sent the trains to his brother. But now that our first grandson has been born, we are wondering if we downsized a little too much.
Ms. Petroski, a writer and photographer, most recently collaborated with her husband Henry Petroski on “The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors” (W.W. Norton, 2014).
Rob
Great story. Thanks for posting it here..I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Great story, but someone ought to tell Ms. Petrowski the train hobby's alive and well, just waiting for her and hubby to jump back in.
THIS time, O Gauge!
It was a fun article to read. I read it in the paper a couple of days ago and it definitely made me smile.
Joe
Some one does need to tell her it is alive and well and which way they go is up to them I prefer O but to me as long as you dive back in is what counts
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