Thought everyone might get a chuckle out of this incident that happened many years ago. The guys in my train club have already heard this story(probably 10 times at least!). While it didn't happen during Christmas, it happened at Thanksgiving at my brother's house. At the time, my brother had set up a pretty elaborate Carpet Central holiday floor layout that took up most of the front room next to the dining room. My brother Dave, my nephew Chris, who was about 8 at the time, and myself were happily operating the trains and accessories. Dave had one of the Lionel scale Hudson's from the late 1980's or early 90's and I had a brand new set of Williams Southern Pacific F7 ABA's with passenger cars in the Daylight colors. Dave and I went into the kitchen/dining room for a couple of minutes and told Chris to keep an eye on the trains(as everything was playing nice with each other for the last 45 minutes or so). In the kitchen, Dave and I were talking with my sister in law when Chris came in and started tugging at my shirt and interrupting our conversation. I told Chris that it was not polite or good manners to interrupt people in the middle of a conversation and Dave said that Chris should wait until we finished speaking before he spoke. Well, Chris quietly stood there for about a minute or so until the "adults" finished our conversation, and then I asked him what he wanted to say. Quote, "Uncle Nick, I just wanted to know if your orange engine was supposed to shoot fire out the top"! My brother and I ran to the train room, to find my Williams SP powered A unit smoking, a small flame shooting out of the roof, and the shell completely melted onto the frame. Apparently, it had developed a major short. I looked at Chris and asked him why he didn't say something and of course he just said that we told him not to interrupt the "adults". Fortunately, we didn't burn the house down. On top of everything, I phoned Williams trains and explained what happened-I was told to ship the engine back to them- and about a week later I received a brand new engine with a note that they were covered by their lifetime warranty. This was when jerry Williams was running things. Anyway, Thought someone would get a smile from this story.
Nick
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