Rail Dreams

[bluegargantua]

Hi,

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

Comments

[purple-dj.livejournal.com]

My dad has quite a bit of Lionel stuff he got as a kid and kept. They always came out at Christmas when I was growing up and would also sometimes take over the ping-pong table in the basement.

As a kid, I loved playing with the trains and day-dreaming over the stuff in his catalogs. The funny thing is, they were the Lionel catalogs he had picked up as a kid and kept with his collection. So, I'm nostalgic for 1950's Lionel from my 1980's childhood... Their marketing was amazing, and was still effective on their target market of young boys even 30 years later.

Some of the classic Lionel steam engines with full steel bodies ... you pick those up and they just *feel* like they mean business.

[hawkhandsaw.livejournal.com]

My dad had a Lionel set like you describe. It used to come out at Christmas time to run around the tree. I remember an engine, caboose and three cars along with five buildings and enough track to make an oval. When I was a tween, he traded it in at a train shop for a huge set of a smaller scale, (H maybe? The engine was about 6-8" long.)

Together we built a custom table and layout that covered about 70 square feet in the basement. It used about 2 and a half sheets of plywood for table surface in an L-shaped layout. The far back corner had the table in the center of the loop cut out and was eventually designed to be a mountain who's top could be removed so you could go under the table and come up inside the middle to work on the back corner.

It was a pretty ambitious project that we both worked on for a couple years but never quite got to the 'trees and grass and small people waving' stage that you see good set ups finished with. We had a lot of fun haunting train shops picking up stuff to add to the set and I remember hours of running trains on the half finished plywood table.

[goldenoak.livejournal.com]

That is so awesome. :)

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Isn't that store in Malden nice? Just visited there for the first time recently myself (looking for stuff I could repurpose for Warmachine).

[bluegargantua]

I only wish S-scale was a more popular size. If they had pre-built structures in S the way they do in HO or N, our wargamming terrain needs would pretty much be done for us.

later
Tom

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

I find that Warmachine is done to "heroic" scale, so O gauge (around 1:50) works pretty well.

(Since the Iron Kingdoms have railroads, I'm dying to pick up some of the Japanese Arii Steam Locomotive kits for "terrain" decoration... Probably have to eBay 'em.)

[goldenoak.livejournal.com]

My family has an old Lionel set that was my grandfather's - my dad remembers it from childhood. It goes around (and under) the christmas tree every year, and is a part of my platonic ideal of "christmas"... we spent hours playing with it as kids. Somehow the fact that it was only out for a few weeks each year made it that much more magical.

So I say... embrace the magic and get a train set! In whatever size makes you happiest. :)