In the beginning . . .

[Anonymous]

About 1956+-,I started in HO. My first engines were a Mantua 0-4-0 Booster and a sharknose diesel bought at a Firestone Store. What a combination! With fiber-tie track and six percent grades on Tru-Scale wood roadbed, and a two-foot high mountain painted with brown shoe polish in the middle! I still like to remember those days. Old-timers, can you remember your first engine(s)and layout? Ole Green River

[Morpar]

Don't know if I count as an "old-timer", but here it goes just the same. Remember? I still have my first train set and layout. 4X8 plywood, originally painted green, I changed that in the following years. Tyco Spirit of '76 C430 set with over and under bridge set. Still have it all, except the brass sectional track. The 18" high mountain I had was a "corner unit." This was all in the Christmas of '75. So, who's next? Morpar

[dknelson]

Early 1960s: I 'graduated' from Lionel via an HO train set for my birthday -- it was a Penn Line Southern Pacific F unit plus two all metal flat cars a reefer and a caboose. I did not know it at the time but the Penn Line set was probably chosen because Penn Line was going bankrupt at the time and their stuff was dumped on the market at bargain basement prices. For the price it was pretty high quality, at the time.
The F unit was an early victim of my youthful efforts to disassemble things and try to get them back together again. The freight cars I converted to better trucks and couplers years ago (the old Penn Line flanges were super-deep, like little cheese cutters) and now I discover that the old zinc frames of the reefer and the bodies of the flat cars are cracking and disintegrating -- the common fate of old zinc castings.
I sure had fun with that set and am still in HO to this day. But darn I wish I'd kept the old Lionel trains!
Dave Nelson

[bfsfabs]

Greenriver,
Christmas 1941 yielded a Lionel 2-4-2 with 3 passenger cars and 3 freight cars. Ran it on the floor, under the bed and out in the yard in the summer.
Got into HO in the mid fifties. My first HO loco was, still is, an International Cab Forward. Pretty good looker, lousy runner. Still not a great runner even after many overhauls. May try it again someday. HO ran on a 1 x 12 double tracked shelf around the inside of a 2 car garage. Much fun. Had no idea what I was doing. Things have changed much since then.

Lowell Ryder
California Lines
Pacific & Southwest Railroad Co (HO)
[e-mail]

[bfsfabs]

Dave,

I have some of those bargain basement Penn Lines, really pretty good locos. Still cookin' along.
As to old castings. One of my Hobbytown Alco FA bodies just sorta turned to little scraps of metal sawdust over time. Small tear. . .
You are right; never should have traded the Lionel in on the HO. Good idea at the time, retrospect shows a different view however.

Lowell Ryder
California Division
Pacific & Southwest Railroad Co (HO)
[e-mail]

[dknelson]

Lowell I do not regret switching from Lionel to HO but oh what an idiot I was for selling them all for peanuts. All in original boxes! And with all the catalogs! I was ripped off even by 1966 standards. LOL
Dave

[Anonymous]

Mom and Dad would never let me keep the lionel up after christmas (bummer) , So about the same time as you I'm guessing, I went to a little hobby shop and started buying what must have been athern models, got several freight cars and I guess what was an f-8, had to pu***hem around a little oval of track I nailed to a sheet of plywood. Used to save my pennies and buy a car when I could afford it. Never could afford a running engine and a power pack tho.
The ex got the lionel for the kids when we became exes, have no idea where it is now.
It took until '95 before I had a permanant HO layout.


ahhhh memories
Don

[cbq9911a]

My first HO engine was a Lionel NYC GP-7, with a milk car, dump car, hopper, pipe car, and caboose. This was the engine with rubber band and gear drive. :( Got a replacement a few years back and replaced the Lionel mechanism with an Athearn one.

My first O gauge engine was a Lionel 2037LTS. Still going after 39 years! Still got 3 cars from the set as well.

[csxns]

In the beginning GOD created TYCO.A SF switcher 50ft boxcar gon with pipe load and caboose.

[Anonymous]

...had a Marx trainset, and prior to that , a Trix Twin British 00 AC trainset.....
BUT the "scale" beginning was 1956, an Athearn
B & O trainset with GP-7 locomotive,no handrails, with "Hi-F" rubber band drive. All cars with sprung trucks, including the 4-trucked Erie flatcar.
All cars still in operation, with Kadee wheels & couplers..locomotive shell still in use,with handrails, on a 1960's Athearn gear drive.
regards / Mike

[Anonymous]

My first train set was the Lionel 027 cast iron yard goat 040 and work train in 1956. It was more of a toy than an interest in model railroading until I nailed the track down to dad's ping pong table. I found most of the train a few years later when we moved to a new house and traded it to a hobby store in Birmingham, Mich. for HO scale track, power pack, some freight cars and I think a Train Master. That went together on a 12X8 open grid table which was an ambitious effort to build a model railroad in the mid 60s. My sisters boyfriend had graduated from trains and gave me his HO scale Lionel set which I added to my stuff. In the late 60s when I went into my Junior year in HS, trains weren't cool anymore and I set aside the Lionel stuff to return to my sisters boyfriend and sold my collection. I got on with life and traveled the world for a while until the early 1980s when I got an interest in model railroading with my son. I found that my folks still had the HO Lionel stuff so that was added to the D&J Railroad. Now the D&J Railroad has grown to a full basement empire with DCC almost worthy of coverage in MR.

[leighant]

First train, in 1947, Marx tinplate and I mean lithographed TIN. More trains the next year, a Lionel, but the third Train Christmas, Dad outdid Lionel. He cut and bent angles from sheet metal and soldered them together to make a three-foot long steel truss bridge, made a ramp up to the bridge out of sheet metal that CAME APART IN SECTIONS with the Lionel track soldered to it, three sections up and three sections down, the ramps made to resemble fill with retaining walls. Then the piece de resistance was a country station soldered together out of sheet metal with hip roof, passenger and baggage platform, hinged sheet metal doors for people and sliding doors for the baggage section and real plate glass in the windows! That holiday season, we went to see a movie about the brave pilots bombing the enemy bridges, and I staged a scene bombing the bridge with a brick. Dad got upset @#$%&*!!! But she straightened out the wreckage and I have the Lionel size steel truss bridge mounted on my train room wall. Five years later, we took a trip from Texas to California the year after Disneyland opened, and Dad was building a big Lionel layout 24 feet long. Dad designed the track layout but I had an idea for scenery to reflact our trip. I figured on scenicing ten feet as Texas, four as New Mexico, four as Arizona and six as Southern California. Later, I learned from reading "Model Railroader" that this is called "selective compression" but I may have been overdoing it. Kenneth L. Anthony, Corpus Christi, Texas.

[Anonymous]

Speaking of sheet metal soldered together,I once had a Suydam sawmill I had to soldertogether usinga big ole iron I heated in the heating stove, one joint at a time. Done pretty good job too! Greenriver

[Anonymous]

me first layout was huge and da first engines i had were 2 chessie systems and a sante fe