Rail Dreams
Sep. 12th, 2010 11:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So my grandfather worked as a railroad man on the Burlington Railroad between Alliance and Lincoln in Nebraska. Mostly he worked out of the caboose as the lines switched over from passenger service to mostly freight.
When I was three, he got me a Lionel train set for Christmas. I was three, it was the most amazing thing in the world to sit there on the floor of his living room and send the train racing around the track. My mom thought I was a little too young for it and she might have been right, but it was a favored toy.
We took it home and my dad laid out the track on a sheet of 4x6 plywood and put it down on top of the ping pong table in the basement. It was a figure-8 inside of an oval. He built up a simple barn and grain silo and depot. I could send the train around and put fisher-price people (pot people) into the gondola and send them round and round. On a later Christmas, he got me a searchlight car, so we'd turn off the lights and watch the lit train go around.
Eventually we moved to the country to a small house with no room in the basement. The track went up against a wall and was soon forgotten about.
I mention all this because the siren call or setting up another model railroad layout is running through me. I even went to a train show in Wakefield. It sort of settled in my mind, that the last thing I should do is get involved in building a model railroad layout. I'm mostly interested in running trains, not all the work to get a setup built. These days you can buy a lot of stuff ready-made and I suppose I could just set up "iconic" structures as I did when I was a kid, but I know I'd want more and I'd want to run the trains. But I also feel like I'd eventually lose focus. I'd get tired of the layout or just stop running the trains and then it'd just be taking up space.
But still...it itches at me.
So this weekend I swung by the model railroad store in Malden. It's a pretty big place, but the shop has quite a bit of O-gauge stuff (like the Lionel trains I had as a kid) along with G-scale. G-scale is short for Garden Scale. It's twice the size of O-guage trains so the engines are about 2.5 feet long and loaded with detail.
They are gorgeous. Just a huge detailed hefty piece of train. The engines were massive and the boxcars were bright and colorful. Of course, G-scale trains don't normally run indoors, you set it up outdoors and thread the track through flower beds -- it's garden school for a reason.
And again, I was seized with an unreasonable desire to set up one of these monsters. It's impractical for so many reasons. My yardwork mostly consists of trying to mow as little as possible. I've got a black thumb. The trains could only run for a small portion of the year and would be an attractive nuisance to children, animals and vandals in the neighborhood. Too much trouble.
But man, are those trains beautiful.
later
Tom
So my grandfather worked as a railroad man on the Burlington Railroad between Alliance and Lincoln in Nebraska. Mostly he worked out of the caboose as the lines switched over from passenger service to mostly freight.
When I was three, he got me a Lionel train set for Christmas. I was three, it was the most amazing thing in the world to sit there on the floor of his living room and send the train racing around the track. My mom thought I was a little too young for it and she might have been right, but it was a favored toy.
We took it home and my dad laid out the track on a sheet of 4x6 plywood and put it down on top of the ping pong table in the basement. It was a figure-8 inside of an oval. He built up a simple barn and grain silo and depot. I could send the train around and put fisher-price people (pot people) into the gondola and send them round and round. On a later Christmas, he got me a searchlight car, so we'd turn off the lights and watch the lit train go around.
Eventually we moved to the country to a small house with no room in the basement. The track went up against a wall and was soon forgotten about.
I mention all this because the siren call or setting up another model railroad layout is running through me. I even went to a train show in Wakefield. It sort of settled in my mind, that the last thing I should do is get involved in building a model railroad layout. I'm mostly interested in running trains, not all the work to get a setup built. These days you can buy a lot of stuff ready-made and I suppose I could just set up "iconic" structures as I did when I was a kid, but I know I'd want more and I'd want to run the trains. But I also feel like I'd eventually lose focus. I'd get tired of the layout or just stop running the trains and then it'd just be taking up space.
But still...it itches at me.
So this weekend I swung by the model railroad store in Malden. It's a pretty big place, but the shop has quite a bit of O-gauge stuff (like the Lionel trains I had as a kid) along with G-scale. G-scale is short for Garden Scale. It's twice the size of O-guage trains so the engines are about 2.5 feet long and loaded with detail.
They are gorgeous. Just a huge detailed hefty piece of train. The engines were massive and the boxcars were bright and colorful. Of course, G-scale trains don't normally run indoors, you set it up outdoors and thread the track through flower beds -- it's garden school for a reason.
And again, I was seized with an unreasonable desire to set up one of these monsters. It's impractical for so many reasons. My yardwork mostly consists of trying to mow as little as possible. I've got a black thumb. The trains could only run for a small portion of the year and would be an attractive nuisance to children, animals and vandals in the neighborhood. Too much trouble.
But man, are those trains beautiful.
later
Tom
