Mention lawn darts to anyone under 20 and you get that confused look.......
fresh silage from the neighboring farms,
memiograph paper (flash back from elementary school),
fresh baked WET bottom shoe fly CAKE, NOT THE PIE!
Raymond Leggs wrote:the smell of my 70's early 90's stereo equipment. (smells like burning lint and hot electronics components)
concretelackey wrote: Mention lawn darts to anyone under 20 and you get that confused look.......fresh silage from the neighboring farms, memiograph paper (flash back from elementary school),fresh baked WET bottom shoe fly CAKE, NOT THE PIE!
"memiograph paper"??? Boy does that take me back. When the teacher passed out the quiz sheets, I wasn't the only one to hold that paper up to my face and take big whiff. Apparently, that passed for a buzz when we were in fourth grade.
I haven't read through this entire thread but another reminiscent odor is from smudge pots which were forerunners of orange barrels at road maintenance sites. For some reason, I always associate that smell with visits to Chicago even though I know they were used elsewhere. It just seemed that everywhere you went in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, there was road work being done and smudge pots were there to alert motorists.
easyaces wrote:Smells of the old Chicago stock yards on hot summer nights back in the mid to late 60's. They were on the south side, and I lived on the north side. When the wind was from the south the smell would just hang on the breeze!
I grew up in Omaha in the 1950s and 1960s and by then Omaha had overtaken Chicago as the stock yard capital of the world. We lived on the near north side and the stock yards were in south Omaha, but on those warm, humid summer days when the winds was out of the south, you felt like you were right next door to them.
How about the aroma of fresh baked rolls as I walked into the school cafeteria for lunch (even if I brought my own sack, I enjoyed the aroma immensely).
Fresh sawdust --Lou, you brought that to mind. The "experts" now say we should put on dust masks when working with wood.
Creosote is memorable, to be sure, but to me not particularly a favorite.
Hi all,
Coal smoke from a steamer, always sends me back to my childhood with mum & dad taking us on fan trips.
The smell of my first model train, a Triang Pacific with syncro smoke, I still have it now, and the smoke unit still works better than any new loco made ( in HO ) and it's thirty odd years old !
A particular smell from the old Sydney " red rattlers " from the seventies, I've noticed it on other trains, but whenever I get a whiff of it, it takes me back to the seventies and going into town from the burbs with mum & dad to see a movie or go to the Royal Easter Show. I think the smell is actually from the brake air tanks, but I'm not sure. Maybe fellow Aussies could help out on that one ?
The "aroma" from the tunnels when you stood on the underground platforms of the City Circle line in Sydney and the trains "pushed" the fragrance in front of them as they pulled in.
Must say this is an excellent thread, provokes such strong memories..............
Cheers,
Warren
While in college, I worked 3 summers as a switchman for the Soo Line. This was '66,'67 and '68 and all yard jobs in this area had Alco switchers assigned. The 373 (retrucked RSC-2) was at Shops Yard throughout these years and I worked more jobs with this unit than any other.
If we got ahold of a long cut (sometimes 75-100 cars) with the 373, there would be a good deal of wheel slip even with a generous amount of sand. Being on the ground and usually near the engine, I was treated to the burning smell as a spinning wheel ground over the rail, throttle wide open and lots of black smoke. After over 40 years, this is still a vivid memory.
john
Hmmmm....
I'm sure there are others but that's all I can think of at the moment.
Tom
https://tstage9.wixsite.com/nyc-modeling
Time...It marches on...without ever turning around to see if anyone is even keeping in step.
Creosote! Reminds me of my days riding freight trains, and working in the train yard. Since my layout is in the garage, I took a piece of scrap plywood, and painted it with creosote on both sides, and just stood it up against the wall, under the layout.
Pine chips and sawdust. Reminds me of riding through Georgia, in a boxcar, on a hot August night, back in the 60s. Lots of pulpwood operations in Georgia.
Several creosote memories...
I worked for a track contractor in the summer of 1978; we would unload flatbed semi-trailers of fresh ties; then drag them to where they needed to go...
Driving through Central Texas in the spring of 1986 to see my girlfriend (now wife) and stopping in Somerville to take pictures of the branchline motive power stored there; and the fragrence of fresh creosote (from the Santa Fe tie plant) in the air.
My current commute can take me through Somerville; and the smell of creosote brings back memories of hard work and chop nosed GP-7's (I'm gonna see my wife when I get home; it has been years since I've seen a chop-nosed Santa Fe GP-7...)
What a fascinating thread to read!
For me, it's the smell of woodsmoke from campfires, even better woodsmoke from campfires mixed with frying bacon. Brings back the most pleasant memories of camping for many years. Haven't been able to go camping for almost 15 years now and probably never will again, but the memories come back strong whenever I smell a campfire.
..... Bob
Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here. (Captain Kirk)
I reject your reality and substitute my own. (Adam Savage)
Resistance is not futile--it is voltage divided by current.
Honeysuckle in the summertime, my hometown was inundated with it. No matter where you went in the town, you could smell it. Creasote on RR ties, my grandparents lived accross the street from the tracks. The electrical ozone from my Marx and American Flyer trains when I was a kid and the smell of the Christmas tree that they ran around. Absolutely the most wonderful times of my life.
Dick
Texas Chief
This is my first time responding in quite a while. It warms my heart to read all of your replies. Smells evoke the strongest memory associations according to psychologists. In addition to the smells I posted at the outset of this thread, I like the smell of freshly cooked oatmeal in the morning. I rarely eat it since I really like peanut butter and whole wheat bread in the mornings, but cooking oatmeal reminds me of Grandma's house. For some reason, when we were staying at Grandma's, as soon as my butt hit the dining room chair, no matter what I had been doing, I was instantly ravenous and always loved her delicious meals.
Doesn't charcoal have a wonderful smell when it is first lit? Of course I have long since stopped using it, but I do have fond memories of childhood summer meals on the deck and it was often I who was asked to get the grill fired up with briquettes. Hey, maybe it was the lighter fluid...first.
Speaking of summer, if you ever frequented the local pool on those very hot days as a youngster, didn't the smell of the chlorinated water please you? I know it got me excited as I got the first whiff. Even now, walking past a pool brings on a smile.
-Crandell
Some railroad smells that are memorable for me:
The perfume of lumber laden boxcars and bulkhead flats on a heavy drag freight from Oregon, pulling past our train into a siding in the middle of a warm summer night on the high plains of western Colorado.
The sharp scents of sage, creosoted ties, ballast, and steel, wetted by an afternoon shower in the Great Basin Desert on the Overland Route.
The stench of overheated traction-motor insulation filling the cab as our train struggled up a 3.0% grade at night in Alaska.
The aroma of sizzling bacon in the diner as the Zephyr swept past me standing in a snowbank on a grey winter's day.
Burned coffee in the pot in the dispatcher's office break room with dawn breaking over the yard, fog tendrils drifting through the wreck train cold and idle on the track outside, joy in my heart with the knowledge that another shift was ended with the trains met, the crews called, and breakfast waiting for me at home.
RWM
Old Spice and Half & Half pipe tobacco. Both used by my father, who died young.
Freshly cut grass.
Rain.
Dave
Lackawanna Route of the Phoebe Snow
Brent
"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."
The smell of hot lubricating oil, burning coal, and machines.
When I was a kid, my grandpa was a stationary boiler engineer at the power house for the CB&Q Denver yard. We would go visit him and take his lunch on Sundays when he was required to work "long Sunday", 7 am to 11 pm. once per month. The smell (aroma to me!) of the power house was great.
I had not smelled that aroma for decades until last summer - I had the good fortune of touring the locomotive maintenence facility at McAlister Army Depot in Oklahoma. When I walked into that building, I instantly recognized that same smell. Wow, talk about bring back memories!
Yours In Model Railroading,
John
Littleton, CO
I still think this is a really great idea. Thanks, again, Crandell.
Thought of a couple more:
I used a selenium rectifier, switchable from full-wave to half-wave for better control at slow speeds, on my original HO layout. It gave off the most horrible smell when it overheated or burned out. I haven't smelled selenium anywhere else.
There was a private parking garage in our neighborhood that was mostly empty during working hours. During the summer we went there on our bicycles to cool off because it was about ten degrees cooler in the garage. A bonus was the smooth concrete floor that made it easy to do a skid stop. That garage had a distinctive smell that I would recognize today, and no other garage I've been in smells like that.
Ah, swimming pools in the hot summer. We had beaches and rocks instead of pools. The really exciting smell was that from the mixture of suntan lotion, sweat, and salt water under the hot sun, from the girls, of course.
Baby oil and lanolin on my leather baseball glove
Noxema on a sunburn
Cape Cod - we used to stay there for 2 weeks each summer when I was a kid
Toy caps after being fired in a cap gun
My mom's home made fried chicken and french fries
Modeling the Baltimore waterfront in HO scale
You fellas amaze me with your variety and humanity...I am truly humbled. Suntan lotion...how could that not be a favourite? As for sweating...umm...I know that men and horses sweat, but don't women just perspire? Okay, old joke. Very old.
Anyway, please feel free to continue to add your own input as you encounter this thread, any who pass by. All recollections and sentiment about smells are welcome.