Every now and then you come across a news story that highlights some interesting shift in the culture or society at large. It might be something like a recent story a few weeks ago about how for the first timne in or nation's history the annual number of non-white births surpassed the number of babies of Caucasian background. Or perhaps something like, for the first time ever the majority of graduates from U.S.-based law schools or medical schools are women (or was it incoming students!!?) Then there's the always fascinating announcement of where the nation's "population center is -- that geographic point where, if every person weighed the same, you could "balance" the flat two-dimensional area of the U.S. (In the late 1700's it started out in eastern Maryland. Now it's somewhere in Missouri last I heard.)
Usually, not always, but usually, milestones like these are noteworthy and meaningful because they signify a change that will never be reversed, at least not for quite a long time. (When the country's population center shifted west of the Mississippi for the first time -- maybe in the 1950's -- that had to be a pretty big deal. Who knows whether it will ever shift back eastward?)
Here in my own little train world, I reached an interesting milestone this week that vividly illustrates, to me anyway, how the hobby has changed since I was introduced to it about 53 years ago. Like so many of you other baby boomers out there, as a young child I got a train set for Christmas. Yes, the boxes were orange. The trains ran around the tree at Christmas and disappeared into the attic the other 11 months of the year. For all of my "train-centric" childhood years, this was all I knew. As a kid who lived to flip baseball cards and rush out each month with my 25 cent allowance to buy the latest DC comics, I had no interest in or appreciation of toy trains' history or past, no awareness of the names Marx or Ives or any others. Electric trains meant Lionel. Period.
Fast forward to 2000 or 2001, when i re-enter the hobby. I buy my own Lionel engines for the first time instead of relying on Santa. Then one day i pick up a glossy train magazine and see ads from other companies that make model trains, like Atlas, MTH, Weaver and Williams. And over the years my collection grows. Not with any grand design, but guided only by the pure motivation of what catches my fancy. A beautiful color-scheme. A cool-looking diesel body type. "Wow, a Soo F3 ABA set? I'll take it!" Not because it was a Williams. Because I'd never seen such a set from anyone else (at least not for sale anywhere).
This week I added a new set to my layout -- an MTH Minneapolis & St. Louis FT ABA set. Great-looking engines. So I go to my little inventory of motive power to add this to the list. I do a little counting. And I made the fascinating discovery that now, for the first time ever (really the last 11 years since I began buying trains...."first time ever" just sounds more dramatic!) my MTH engines (not including Rail Kings....just MTH Premier) now outnumber the Lionel engines in my collection. How did this happen? I'm not an "Orange Guy" or a "Purple Demagogue." I don't have Legacy or DCS, so it's not driven by that. I guess it shows how I like to see unusual roadnames in different diesel models. It's just what appeals to me. That's one of the great things about this hobby IMO...the variety of product and the number of differing approaches that various manufacturers take. Something for everyone. I just found it fascinating that I started out as someone who only knew the "dominant player," the name that was synonymous with electric trains for 100 years, and now another train company seems to make more of what I want. And I wonder, like some of these other sociological milestones...is this something permanent? I guess time will tell. Time and whatever appears in the pages of the next catalogs that are published this fall and winter!
- Mike
