dbaker48 wrote: 1688torpedo wrote: P.S. Don- Your Son probably wishes he was around in those days so he could have a Corvair.)] Take Care all.Keith, At the risk of bein accussed of child abuse and neglect. I havn't introduced him to the world of Corvairs. He has very definite plans of assuming possession of MY El Camino. Which I'm sure he will get this fall. I told him I would put a new paint job, and reupholster. Any thing else is up to him. He now is working at Knotts Berry Farm, and saving his money for a flair kit and a set of wheels. (I will reuqire him to "buy" the car from me, I want him to understand the principle of saving for what you want)By the way in the film Talledega Nights their is a Chevelle in the opening scenes, had one of those too, back in 69 70. It was a 396, and really hot. But expensive to maintain. I look at the kids today with there "rice rockets", and can't imagine what they would do if they SAW a real muscle car.Enjoy.......Oh yeah... I enjoyed your post as well, its nice to have a lot of family, hope your still in touch with them.
1688torpedo wrote: P.S. Don- Your Son probably wishes he was around in those days so he could have a Corvair.)] Take Care all.
Don
I grew up in Southern Ohio and I live in the same house I grew up in. Railroad history is thick around here. As were were growing up the boys hoped to work in the Steel Mill or the Railroad. A few blocks away is a railroad bridge that spans the Ohio River. Here is a little blurp about the bridge:
"The bridge was made by Gustav Lindenthal completed two monumental bridges in 1917. Of the two, he is better known for the massive Hell Gate rail bridge in New York. Sciotoville, however, is equally impressive. In Bridges: Spans of North America David Plowden wrote:"As with Hell Gate, everything about Sciotoville is, and needed to be, gigantic, for over the line on which it was built rolled some of the world's heaviest trains. It was designed to carry 78,800 pounds per linear foot, the highest combined live and dead loads ever called for in any bridge."
The bridge is huge, and as a kid we would play on the bridge and cross it into Kentucky and search for Indian artifacts in the freshly plowed fields.
The N&W yards in Portsmouth Ohio were once one of the largest, and the Steel Mill ran for miles along the river. As a kid we could here the whistle from the Open Hearth when they were about to make a pour and at night we would run outside and watch the dark sky glow red as they would pour the molten steel. Where I live, we could and still do hear train and tug whistles (or horns), as major north south and east west rail lines pass each other, and the tugs push barges up and down the Ohio.
The tracks were like sidewalks to us and we walked the tracks to school because it was a shorter route than using the sidewalk and roads.
As far as toy trains go, we were poor, so my only memory of a toy train was an American Flyer cattle car thay my cousin gave me. No track, loco, or power supply, just the cattle car. I tell my wife, I can now afford what I could not as a kid. I don't have the car from my youth, but I've got a couple now and when I see them, it brings back memories. I am now making memories with my grand kids, who are train crazy.
Jim
I grew up in the mid to late fifties. Every Christmas we would make several trips to Brandies Department Store in downtown Omaha to see the two large operating layouts on display in the eighth floor toy department. One layout was Lionel and the other American Flyer, complete with all of the newest operating accessories.
They usually ran the low end sets on these displays, but I remember it was quite a thrill to ocassionally see a Santa Fe F-3, a 736 Berkshire, or a 336 Northern heading a brand new outfit. The high point of the day was when the salesman would hand out the brand new Lionel and Flyer catalogs. I'd take mine home and make a wish list of trains that I knew I'd never have. I'd memorized the pages of those catalogs until I'd see the trains in my sleep. The trains of this golden era will always be my favorites as they remain the center of my train collection.
FJ and G wrote:Sask T, You are NOT alone in being born in the "wrong" era. I believe sincerely that everyone born after about 1953 or '54 (myself included), were in the time zone when model trains were an eccentric part of a child's hobby.
I was born in 1986, when the golden age of trains (real and toy) had long since passed. I grew up in the very small town of Langenburg, Saskatchewan, which is served by a secondary Canadian Pacific line that sees just a few trains a day. The last time a passenger train used the line was the 60's. Growing up, I saw plenty of CP Rail action red diesels and lots of covered hoppers for grain or potash. I was fascinated by trains for longer than I can remember. My parents tell me about having to take me for drives as a toddler just to go looking for trains. I'm just old enough to remember cabooses being on trains. It's a good thing that my town was served by CP and not CN because CN got rid of cabooses before CP did. My parents tell me about driving somewhere and passing a CN train with no caboose. I cried and finally calmed down only after I was assured that the train was going to pick up a caboose which was sitting on a siding behind some trees. I can remember the short time during the very final days of cabooses when you would often see multiple cabooses on trains (the most I remember counting is six), being transported to storage sidings or scrapyards I'm assuming. Then, they were gone forever.
I sometimes wonder if I was born in the wrong era because even as a little kid I was a confirmed steam fan (even before I had ever seen a real steam engine in operation). In the Western Development Museum in Moose Jaw, Sask. there is CP pacific 2634, built by MLW in 1913. When I first visited that museum at age 3 or 4, it was impossible to get me to leave the cab of that engine. My dad ended up taking my mom to a mall and then coming back to the museum with me so I could sit in the engineer's seat some more.
When I was very young, I had some train toys of different kinds, but that wasn't enough. One of my favourite pasttimes was making my own trains by lining up things. There are pictures of the long (and when I say long, I mean LONG) trails of toys, shoes, boxes, stuffed animals and just about anything else you could think of that ran all over the house. There was even a Christmas when I didn't want open any of the presents, but just line them all up to make a train!
When I was about 4, I got my first "real" train: a Playmobil G scale set, which ran on LGB track, but was made for kids. It had a red diesel switcher, brown gondola car, yellow boxcar and circle of track, plus people and other accessories that went with it. The story behind it is that my aunt was in a mall and found it at a toy store (long gone today) on sale for something like $70, regular $250. She phoned my mom about it, who told her to buy it. It was added to later on with straight track, a cattle car, a caboose and more people and things.
When I was about 6, I got my first HO set while on vacation in Minot, ND one summer. It was Bachmann and had a chrome ATSF Warbonnet F9, UP open hopper car, RI boxcar and ATSF caboose. For my Brithday that year, I got a Canada grain hopper, CN gondola with coal, EL boxcar, Atlas station kit and straight track. I also had "the green board" to set it up on. This was a piece of plywood with astro turf that I would lay on the livingroom floor and run my HO on. At Christmas, I got another HO set, also a Bachmann circle set, but all CP Rail this time.
These were by no means the only trains I had as a kid. I also had a wide variety of plastic battery operated train sets, a large collection of Micro Machines trains, some Ertl Thomas The Tank Engine stuff and various floor toys. By this time the days of making my own trains were over, but that certainly didn't mean that the floor was any less cluttered! I was constantly making layouts on the floor with my trains and other toys that could be used with them like Hot Wheels cars, plastic farm animals and Lego. Many of these layouts were extremely elaborate and quite grandiose.
By the time I was in second grade, it became obvious that I needed something better for my ever-growing HO collection than the green board, so my dad built me a large L-shaped HO layout in the basement that could run three trains at once. There were four sidings-one for an elevator on one line and three others on another line for a yard. My HO trains now had a permanent railroad in which to reside, but that didn't keep my other trains off the floor upstairs.
Growing up in the 90's, trains weren't exactly the coolest thing and none of my friends or classmates were interested in trains. While they didn't give me hard time about it or anything, I'm quite sure that they all regarded my obsession with steel wheels on steel rails as unusual to say the least. However, whenever I had any kids over at my place (male or female), my layout was always the #1 thing they wanted to play with!
For all the different kinds of toy trains I had, there was still one train I desperately wanted-a Lionel! My uncle had a Scout set as a kid and there's a picture of it taken at that time. The set was long gone by the time I was born. Ever since I saw that picture, I wanted that train! I eventually got a vintage O gauge Marx set at an collectable toy sale when I was 11, which absolutely thrilled me. A Lionel finally came when I was 12, but that's another story.
In the late 50's early 60's I lived a block from the Cotton Belt track in Dallas, which is now the Dallas North Tollway. The view was blocked by houses, but not the sound. There was a long 8:30 train that ran every evening. That was my curfew. I had until the caboose went by to be on the front porch. If I was within my allowed "radius" of a couple of blocks from home when I first heard the train, I could make it home at a slow trot or an easy bike peddle. If I had wandered outside my "perimeter" and I heard the train, it was time stretch em and haul it home in a hurry. Rounding the corner after the caboose had passed usually resulted in Pop being on the front porch. Life for me was a lot easier when Pop wasn't on the front porch waiting. That 8:30 Cotton belt train was a part of my life for years! On a special day Pop would splurge. We'd hop in the '55 BelAir, get an ice cream cone and sit at the crossing and watch it go by.
I did have a lionel at that age, but my thoughts today are more about that Cotton Belt!
Good thread, David. In the sixties, I was in hopscotching across Central America with my family; my childhood memories are of the early 70s, when my dad built an immense (to me) HO figure 8 layout on a pingpong table he somehow fit in what became my sister's bedroom. My brothers and I had a Tyco Burlington passenger set and Santa Fe freight set and between them and loads of toy soldiers and Matchbox cars, we really enjoyed that layout. All came down before my sister was born in 1976. My dad had his pre-war trains at his folks house. I never knew about them until I was out of college. Now the 248 - revamped by Madison Hardware - which I vaguely remember visiting - runs proudly on the current layout.
Doug Murphy 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...' Henry V.
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
We always had the christmas garden under the tree. I remember it earliest as being AF, but my dad always kept his Lionel Commodore Vanderbilt set(which I still have). Many neighbors , friends and relatives all had their own Christmas Garden, either AF or Lionel.
Dad decided to start a big AF layout in the basement, which never got much scenery, but we had great fun with it.
Then we sold all the AF to an uncle because we were going to go into HO. I can remember going to stores and buying HO buildings to put together. Seems we always bought Faller since they were less expensive. So then, HO was under the tree.
In high school, I got interested in N scale, and sold all the HO to build a 4'x8' N layout in our attic. I was kitbashing, scratchbuilding, using Kadee couplers(what a nerd I must have been in high school).
College time there was no interest until a friend needed to build a model of the Thomas Viaduct(stone arch bridge southeast of Baltimore). That rekindled my interest.
For some reason, I started into O, and started going to shows, and sales. But now we are beyond the nostalgic period.
Joe Hohmann wrote: felixg wrote:Hello Dave...Well if you remember the 3rd ave el to must have heard of the myrtle ave el, I think it was the oldest of all the lines in nyc. That's the one we used when I lived in Brooklyn and then in Queens. Felix We lived in Ridgewood, Queens...where I got my first Lionel in 1946, age 4. We moved to NJ in '48. Joe
felixg wrote:Hello Dave...Well if you remember the 3rd ave el to must have heard of the myrtle ave el, I think it was the oldest of all the lines in nyc. That's the one we used when I lived in Brooklyn and then in Queens. Felix
Felix
We lived in Ridgewood, Queens...where I got my first Lionel in 1946, age 4. We moved to NJ in '48. Joe
Modeling the Baltimore waterfront in HO scale
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