Good Morning, Crew! I'd like to add to this thread as a way to introduce myself. I was raised in northern NJ with the Erie main line just a stone's throw away from our backyard and the small, long-gone Erie station right down the street, hence my user name. The other station is still in the center of town, the NYS&W station, that's been preserved. This was the time that steam had been mostly replaced by the earlier diesels and I watched many RS2/3s or PAs pulling Stillwell coach commuter trains, E8s speeding down the track with through trains from Chicago heading for the Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, NJ, as well as Geeps and FAs dragging long freights. I have fond memories of my father taking me for train rides into New York City and crossing the Hudson River on the Lackawanna Railroad's ferry boats. It was also a time when we could arrange for a cab ride or to look around at the inside of a caboose, which we did. Today I'm replacing an Sn3 shelf layout with an HO layout based on a hypothetical freight transfer/switching yard between the DL&W and the Erie set in Paterson, NJ in the early '50s era. But that's for another post.
Russ
Modeling the early '50s Erie in Paterson, NJ. Here's the link to my railroad postcard collection: https://railroadpostcards.blogspot.com/
My first railroad memory actually is an inspiration for my current project.
I grew up in Detroit near the yard of the Detroit Terminal Railroad which was located at Mound and Davison in the east side of the city.
One spring day, I think it was 1968, the nun gave us an assignment to write a report on anything we were interested in. I rode my bike to the office of the DTRR and knocked on the door and explained to the man that i would like some pamphlets or something taht described the railroad. This was a Friday afternoon and he invited me to return the next day for a tour.
I returned the next morning and was invited in to see the offices and to meet some of the yard workers. Next I was shown around the old roundhouse which was literally falling down by that time. Then it was a walk through the yard so I could see the different buildings, signals and everything else. Finally the tour was over so I was invited into the cab of DTRR #105, an EMD NW-2 engine. My tour concluded with a ride through the entire yard and into some of the industrial spurs.
As the ride was about over I was asked if I wanted to take the controls and bring the engine home. What a thrill that was!
Now I am retired and after building a module for our club layout and moving into my present home I have begun my own layout. It is based on the east side of Detroit in 1949. It is a proto freelanced layout as it has some industries and trackage not found on the original DTRR, but it will capture the times and the feel of industrial switching in post-war Detroit.
Some industries actually existed on the east side but I have chosed to change their location to suit my track plan. Other industries are what would have logically been found in Detroit supporting the auto industry as it rebuild in the post was years.
The only regret I have is that those photos from my youth have long ago been lost. Wish I could have had them to display in my crew lounge.
Late 1950s, a park with an ice skating pond right next to the B&O yards in Lorain, Ohio. EM-1s used to pull strings of coal from West Virginia to the docks for loading on ore boats for Detroit Edison, and leave with strings of Taconite for plants south of us. Winters, when the skating shack opened, we older kids would go out to the tracks, fill our pockets with spilled lumps of coal, and take them back for the old pot-bellied stove. Then, from the Henderson Drive Bridge, sometimes we'd be lucky enough to watch slag cars on the Lake Terminal railroad being dumped. Toni Morrison mentioned it in one of her books! Spectacular! There was the elevating ore dumper at the lake front. A cable system would pull loaded hoppers up a ramp, bump the car on the rotary down the switchback, and be locked onto the system. Them, watching the assorted counterweights moving down, sets stopping at intervals, then all moving to tip the car and its contents into the chute and into the hold of a lake boat. Watching one February morning as a Yellowstone kept slippong both engines trying to start a load out on the .45% grade, watching a SECOND unit coupling on doublehead, and FOUR engines spinning, throwing sparks, and finnaly moving with an L-1 0-8-0 at the point, and possibly a PAIR of the switchers pushing. And finally, one night, going to watch the action, and instead of the 2-8-8-4, this strange pair of somethings painted kind of a dark blue, no tender showing (Baldwin RF-16). During that transition, I got to see Q-1s, S-1s, T-3s, and even a U 0-10-0. And on the crossing Nickle Plate, passenger trains were being pulled by E series diesels, and frieght by 2-8-4a. Can't just pin it down to ONE single early vision!
My earliest railroad memory is my dad taking me to the Ronkonkoma Long Island Rail Road station in the mid-1980s. The line to Ronkonkoma had just been electrified. He'd drive me there in his Fiero (the V6 version) and we'd watch men in business suits boarding shiny M1 and M3 MU cars bound for a far-off place called "the city."
A few years later, I think for my 6th birthday, my parents decided to make it a train day. First, we went to lunch at a restaurant called The Dining Car in East Setauket, NY. This place had an old observation car and two old cabooses that served as dining rooms. The cars are still there, but now it's an Indian place called The Curry Club.
After lunch, my dad and I rode the train from Stony Brook to Port Jefferson, while my mother and brother followed in the car. The conductor punched my ticket and even wished me a happy birthday!
Later that year, we were in a Toys R Us store and my dad, on a whim, bought a Bachmann HO starter set. And that was it, I was hooked on the hobby.
Modeling the Pennsylvania Railroad in N Scale.
www.prr-nscale.blogspot.com
I grew up in Brookville, PA and my Grandfather was an engineer on the Pittsburg & Shawmut RR. I lived within a couple hundred yards of where the Brookville viaduct crossed over the Pennsy / Conrail low grade. I remember the old crusty PC units hauling coal on the low grade in the early 70's. I remember the old yellow and red P&S paint scheme on the locomotives and when the first locomotive and caboose rolled out in the Bicentennial paint scheme. I think my earliest steam train memory was from 1973 when Reading T-1 2102 headed a steam excursion train over the Pittsburg & Shawmut line. However, another early steam memory comes from sometime in the 70's also. I used to go camping with my Grandparents alot and this one particular time we went to the Rustic Acres Campground near Shippenville, PA. I heard the whistle from a long way off and told my Grandpa. He took me up by the railroad tracks and a steam excursion train came through on the old B&O Northern Subdivision.
Robert H. Shilling II
Florence is on the way and I,m ready to move to the basement tomorrow and play with trains all day. I run mainly Southern, but I have many other vintage roads from the South that I love to run
My favorite memory was taking the Southern from Union Station in Washington, D.C., and riding the rails all the way to Grand Junction in West Tennessee. Just a small wooden station but that is where the Southern stopped, then you had to have a relative pick you up drive you Jackson, Tn., our destination.
What a ride, it was a thrill for me, my sister didn't care much about it but for me it was the only way to travel. I loved the coaches, walking through the vestibules and the diaphgrams from car to car. The dining car was fabulous and the food, WOW!
The porters and conductor would tease me and tell my mother that I didn't ride the train on the trip, I walked the whole way. All I did was go from front to back then back again. Once in a while one of the guys would open the dutch doors in the vestibule so I cold look out of the train and feel the breeze.
All of that is pretty much gone, and I think America is missing out on a great way to transport people. Wouldn't it be nice to once again to be able to go the the local train station, buy a ticket and travel anywhere in the U.S. by rail.
Those were the days.
Robert Sylvester
My childhood memory is around Tucson yard on special occasions. I would see Dash 8 SSW and 4 axle geeps with a few SP units.
I travel on Amtrak twice in Minnesota between two stations. I don't remember the names since it was nice two hour trip.
Amtrak America, 1971-Present.
My first train related memories are from the early 80s when I was a little kid. We used to live up the street from part of Conrail's Mon Line tracks near McKees Rocks, PA. and sometimes at night we'd hear the horn blowing. Since it was the early 80s you could still see patched Penn Central locomotives and some jade green boxcars around. Nowadays it's near the site of an interchange between the Pittsburgh & Ohio Centrail RailRoad and Norfolk Southern.
My first train related memory: I can't remember where.. but my parents and I and my brother were travelling along the 4 lane somewhere, and there was a train bridge that crossed the highway diagonally at a sharp angle. Just as we were going under a fast moving steam locomotive passed over us. Don't recall what it was pulling or if this occurred in Europe or on this side of the pond. Quite possibly a steam excursion train.. there were a few of those in the 60s.
The old steam trains, the smell of coal and stream brings it back just thinking about it, and I remember seeing the flying Scotsman with my dad
I had forgot to mention in my previous comment on this thread.....one stupid gig that both cemeted my love of trains, and almost scared me away, possibly forever!
At age 14 in 1952, my two buddies and I stood on the Cedar Lane bridge in Teaneck overlooking the West Shore/NYC four track main. Below was a long freight seemingly stalled....."Hey guys, lets go down the stairs for a closer look". We could not see the loco.....only a distant glimpse, but it was a steamer. Just off the stairs was an old empty gondola in the consist, so we climbed aboard as the train seemed to be parked for a very long time. The car was filthy and empty except for a few old grease stained boards and remnants of some kind of a tarp.
Then it happened... we were almost knocked from our stances to the tune of clanking couplers and what sound like a distant whistle. Yup, off we went...out of town in a direction none of us wanted to go. We tried to jump off, but one of my friends was a porker and the acceleration was just too fast. There was no way we could signal to either the loco or caboose, so we just hunkered down heading north and hoping the freight would soon stop again or slow to a crawl so we could jump. This did not happen and we actually accelerated even more so. After about two hours the Hudson River came into view, and we eventually tied up in Havestraw, NY. Fortunately this was early spring and the day was fairly warm, and then even more fortunately I knew where we were, and my dad was playng golf nearby that Saturday. Well, we immediately found a ride to the club, found dad, and had a serious mess of explaining to do. Actually he was impressed and we all made it home in time for dinner. For years afterwards, he called me "Little Hobo", but thankfully the moniker wore off, but the adventure stayed with me.
HZ
I wasn't much of a train fan until I was an adult. Oh I'd always been interested in them and spent a lot of hours playing with the Lionel. My earliest significant memory of trains was taking the Central from Buffalo Exchange St. to Grand Central. The family with five kids went, and it was an overnight ride in coach. I remember the dark stairs and platform at Buffalo, and for some reason I remember seeing the platform at Utica. On the return trip, I remember seeing the train sweeping around a long curve along the Hudson.
Three occurrances really lit my interest. I remember when they were running steam excursions, sometime in the 60s, and we were driving in Lockport. The train went over the Market St. viaduct, and my dad remarked that there was something you didn't see every day, a steam engine. The second occurrance was standing at trackside and watching a freight go by fast, and if memory serves it was a pair of Alco RS units. The third was watching a CN freight coming across the bridge at Sault St. Marie on a vacation trip.
Genesee Terminal, freelanced HO in Upstate NY ...hosting Loon Bay Transit Authority and CSX Intermodal. Interchange with CSX (CR)(NYC).
CP/D&H, N scale, somewhere on the Canadian Shield
Dan, your situation is a prime example of why we build model railroads. We try to capture that which we lost to "progress" or, recreate that we saw and want to preseve in miniature.
Enjoy the hobby.
As I read these replies, I see a lot of you remember steam. I just missed it, being born in 1958. That couldn't be helped.
What really bugs me it that my family knew I was nuts about trains. We lived WALKING distance from the big (at the time) SP engine terminal with turntable in Eugene Oregon. And never was I taken over for a for so much as a glimpse. I didn't realize how close we'd lived to it until a couple years ago. I was robbed! Dan
My family used to travel by train when I was a little kid. I remember before we got on board on the Santa Fe Super Chief for a trip from Chicago to Los Angeles my grandfather walked with me up to the front of the train to see the locomotives. There was a couple of B units which to me just seemed to be more passenger cars except that they were very noisy and then at the very front was the A unit with the classic red war bonnet paint livery which was really cool. I also remember our sleeping car and how the top bunk opened up at night to be a bed. It was pretty small but so was I. I think I was three or four.
In the early 50's my dad took me to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin from our home in Muscoda to see the dieselized Milwaukee Road Zephyr. It was about a 100 mile round trip on two-lane roads back then.
We make it to the station with a few minutes to spare. Since Prairie du Chien was a passenger stop then, the arrival was kind of anti-climatic compared to the previous streamlined steam locos and steam switchers I was used to seeing in our home town lumber yard/pallet mill and at the Kraft cheese factory/warehouse.
Still a good memory though.
Remember its your railroad
Allan
Track to the BRVRR Website: http://www.brvrr.com/
My first (and when you are over 70, dimmest) train related memories occured in the very early 1950s, when Boston MA, had railroad YARDS. On Sunday morning Dad, (who was a closet railfan) and I would get up early and head over to the Boston and Albany's Beacon Park yard in Alston MA. Sometimes we would find a big, hulking black monster of a steam locomotive under the coal chute getting its tender filled. The most impressive part of this memory was the rumble of the cascading coal.
After Beacon Park, it was across the Charles River, through Cambridge and Boston's West End to the Prison Point bridge which spanned the Boston and Maine tracks, between the Boston engine terminal and North Station. The engine terminal was our focus with a lot of steam but the diesel had a toe-hold that would only strengthen in the coming months.
Back across Boston to the south side, we went into South Station to buy the Sunday papers and see if anything was stirring. Usually, it was as quiet as a library, with maybe one each, New Haven and, B&A Alco switchers idling at the bumper posts. On the way home, a stop at the Southampton Street roundhouse was in order. There were cold New Haven steamers on the tracks around the house that dad knew would never run again but, my young mind did not grasp. Once the steamers were gone our visits on Sunday morning began to be further and further apart, and not last as long. When my brother and sister came along, those Sunday mornings for just me, dad, and our railroad yards came to a close.
The steam is long gone along with all the diesels that replaced it. Dad went to his final rest in 1994. North and South Stations are strange, alien places. And all of Boston's railroad yards followed everything else, into oblivion. Will I be going back to Boston? No, I like my dim memories a whole lot more than what I'd find now. Thank you, dad.
I grew up across the street from a railroad, so trains going by was normal for me since I came home from the hospital. When I was little I would wave at the trains from our fenced-in yard, and when it got dark in the winter I would flash our porch light at them and they'd wave or blow the whistle. Just after I turned five, and just before Christmas, the train stopped in front of the house and the crew gave me a railroad flashlight (silver cylinder with a long red plastic attachment) so I could use that to wave to them at night.
I grew up in Phoenixville, PA, not far from the steel company. I have memories of the small switcher pulling cars filled with slag - and having to wait at the crossing until the train went by and they swept the street. Also remember counting cars whenever we were at a crossing. Then, of course, were the models, Lionel and Marx that we put up at Christmas (and my Uncle, who put up American Flyer trains).
A Conrail hotshot rolling by with 4 standard cab EMD units, while on a bike ride with my dad. (I was 3-4 at the time.)
Between that, and seeing a different CR standard cab GE up close, while around 4 years old, my choice in hobby was made.
Ricky W.
HO scale Proto-freelancer.
My Railroad rules:
1: It's my railroad, my rules.
2: It's for having fun and enjoyment.
3: Any objections, consult above rules.
I can't remember that specific!
Not because it was all that long ago or because the memory is shot. There's just too much in there to sort out. I grew up in Butler, PA. Pullman was already closed by then, although Trinity would use the bones for a few more years. But, even by that late of a date, Butler still sported no less than three railroads. There was just so much going on that a first? No idea.
I do recall seeing a high nose GP something in Conrail colors moving through the miniscule speck of Cabot PA on the ex-PRR Butler Branch sometime around 1988. Couldn't have been much later than that, because the tracks were gone not long after that. I also have memories of seeing B&LE F7s, and those were gone by 1989.
The “Southern Crescent” leaning into the curve at Fairfax Station, silver behind the covered wagons....4501 at speed in the same place, bursting into sight minutes after the sounds heralded her coming.....Southern Geeps and SDs running long hood forward.....a Geep in the turntable pit at Brunswick, with a steaming crane and more employees than I ever saw there, before or since, struggling to rerail it.....Fs on the Brunswick Line, a 2-10-4 and a Royal Hudson....the American Freedom Train at Alexandria.....E-8s and Heritage cars when my friend’s family took me along to pick his grandma up from the “Silver Star.” Pot Yard, almost empty, save for a switcher by the hump, and PC jade green cars on the Long Bridge, trimmed with rust.
http://mprailway.blogspot.com
"The first transition era - wood to steel!"
As I remember so many decades ago...my grandfather and father got this hobby started. The PRR Panhandle Division ran through Carnegie PA, trains approaching the station eastbound would whistle at Walkers Mill and westbound trains either on the main or coming onto the main from the Scully Yard cutoffs would whistle at Wagner tower. Once we heard the whistle, my grandfather and I ran to the red brick platform crossing the PRR Carnegie yard tracks in the process. Remember those F units,coal drags, gons and flats loaded with steel, and an occasional hotbox. The platform in this sweeping curve was maybe 20 feet wide and what a rush to get caught between two freights running at track speed. Also got my first cab ride in a new PRR GP-9 from Carnegie yard to Scully Yard and back. He owned a shoe store at the time and sold work shoes to many of the PRR crews. As for my dad.....he made sure Lionel trains where part of every Christmas starting at the tender age of one. The PRR Congressional set and Wabash F unit’s still ply the rails on my current O gauge layout. Also have my grandfather’s standard gauge freight train,track,switches and transformer packed in a bin. This dates back to 1914 and is operational. Those Lionel trains invoke such wonderful memories of Christmas past and the family members who got this lifetime hobby started. Fast forward a few decades.....I had the pleasure of knowing Cecil H. He was a lifelong PRR employee along with his father. He wrote a book on the PRR Panhandle Division. If memory serves me correctly.......his father opened Wagner Tower @1953. I visited Cecil on a fall afternoon @1988 I think??. Photos taken inside and out. His shift ended at 3:30, we walked out and padlocked the tower for the last time. What an ending to a peice of PRR history. Nearly every vestige of the PRR is gone from Carnegie but the memories will accompany me as I board the train for that final ride home.
Another memory I have was riding the the number 7 Flushing Line from Queens to Manhattan about once a week or so and passing over the Sunnyside yards with all those colorful boxcars.
Joe Staten Island West
Sadly, Robert Kennedy's funeral train, as it went through my home town in New Jersey. I was little, my mom took me up to tracks to watch the train go by. I remember all the people there to pay respects, some standing dangerously on a railroad bridge.
What a great thread!
Thanks everyone, for sharing these memories. They make a very enjoyable read. Don't stop!
Mark P.
Website: http://www.thecbandqinwyoming.comVideos: https://www.youtube.com/user/mabrunton
Mister MikadoTranslation: Dear Paul, my apologies. will you accept a Bronx pizza and a cold beer?
I have never, and shall never, turn down a free, cold beer. The pizza is ok also, but do they deliver to TX?
Paul
Modeling HO with a transition era UP bent
peahrens Mister Mikado I grew up in the Bronx, NY like Paul and was a subway riding fanatic as a kid. I could ride from one end of the city and back for fifteen cents, shunning a much shorter bus ride just to run down to Manhattan and back up to the Bronx on a different line. I should have been more clear, as I grew up in Manhattan (215th St, above Broadway) and could look east from the apartment window (past the 215th street elevated subway in Manhattan) and see the NYC trains running along the Bronx side of the river. I just wanted to make the clarification, lest someone infer that I am a Yankees fan! Better to root for either team that left, than the Yankees, IMHO.
Mister Mikado I grew up in the Bronx, NY like Paul and was a subway riding fanatic as a kid. I could ride from one end of the city and back for fifteen cents, shunning a much shorter bus ride just to run down to Manhattan and back up to the Bronx on a different line.
I should have been more clear, as I grew up in Manhattan (215th St, above Broadway) and could look east from the apartment window (past the 215th street elevated subway in Manhattan) and see the NYC trains running along the Bronx side of the river.
I just wanted to make the clarification, lest someone infer that I am a Yankees fan! Better to root for either team that left, than the Yankees, IMHO.
Translation: Dear Paul, my apologies. will you accept a Bronx pizza and a cold beer?