Model trains!

When I was quite young, perhaps five or six, I got a model train for Christmas. An O-gauge freight train with a steam engine and a few cars, made by Lionel. I found it Christmas morning when my sister and I went downstairs to open our presents. There it was, circling around the tree. It was magical!

Keep in mind, however, that I don’t actually remember that. But it must have happened and it must have been something like that because I really did have that train and that’s just how things went.

In later years I’d get some accessory to go with it, a new car, perhaps some building. I remember kits for buildings that my father would assemble. Later on I got another train, a diesel passanger train with Santa Fe colors and sleek aluminum passanger cars. So my father built a platform in the basement where I could play with the trains all year around. Me and my friends would go down in the basement and play with the trains. My friend Billy Cover had a train layout as well. His was an American Flyer S-gauge, smaller than the Lionel O-gauge, but not as small as the HO gauge in the video.

I would spend hours designing model train layouts, the track patterns, buildings here and there, roads, and landscape. The fact is, I probably had more fun designing layouts than I did actually building them and then playing with the trains. My father had a well-equipped wood shop and he had woodworking skills, after all, he built the train platform. If I’d really wanted to build an elaborate layout, he would have helped me. No, in the end, it was the plans that I had fun with.