Model Train Evolution

I have been interested in trains since I was a baby in a pram. My mother said I would raise my hand at point to the sound of a train whistle! I started with Lionel but when a friend of my dads showed up one day with a Varney HO train set I was on my way….. I sold all my Lionel to Mr. Pelzer, the town cop and built my first layout on a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. Fast forward through college, marriage and a first house and I built a small HO layout in a huge closet in the basement. Built a new house with a large basement and started a larger HO layout. When Malcolm Furlow published his articles in MR of his large G scale layout I sold all my HO stuff and tore out the HO track and started hand laying track using code 250 aluminum rail. Realized my space was just too small so lost interest and nothing happened until I was in a hobby shop one day and they were showing a Bachmann On30 2-6-0. It ran so well I decided there and then to start over in On30. Luckily I had saved all my HO track, turnouts and crossings so I pulled out every other tie and started a new layout. It was up and running and I had started to work on scenery when disaster struck. Some workmen replacing my roof and painting the house somehow managed to start a fire outside my back porch which didn’t ignite until they left. I was up at my summer camp when my neighbor called with the news. When I got home it was all gone down to the foundation but for the front wall. My wife had died of cancer in 1989 at age 40 and I had been going steady with a lady up the street who was divorced. We had planned to sell my house and live together in hers. The fire totally changed our timetable on that! I was able to salvage anything RR related that was boxed or stored inside cabinets but anything that got wet was ruined as the had to foam the house as the excessive heat was endangering the neighbors home. Started my new layout in my new home a couple of years later. It’s a combination of O standard gauge and On30. All my standard gauge locomotives are brass that I have fixed up, painted if needed and have sound decoders in them. My On30 is a mixture of brass diecast MMI and Bachmann. All track and switches are hand laid using Fast Track jigs. DCC using an MRC Prodigy Squared with 1 wired and 2 wireless throttles. I also have the WiFi module that allows guests to use their phones as throttles. They work as well or even better the MRC wireless. I have 3 power districts protected by DCC Specialist PX one with reverse loop. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Peter

I've been active in 1/4" inch model railroading for a long time.  Easliest known photo, Christmas 1950 when I was four.  That's me on the left.  It says something very favorable about a hobby which can satisfy for a lifetime.

Like others I started out in the early ‘70s with hand-me-down PW Lionel trains around the Christmas tree but I loved running those trains and would have run them all year ‘round if my parents let me. Growing up in the city as kid with zero railroad knowledge there were some things that bothered me about the trains. Number one was the center rail, number two there was only 3 ties per piece of track and number 3 was certain pieces of rolling stock were to my young eye not in scale with the locomotive. I had two steamers and an Alco PA. Years later I found out that almost every car I had except one was way off from 1/48 scale. I remember one time going into a hobby shop and seeing a Lionel Standard O boxcar and thinking how huge it was compared to the what we then called O27 which I had. So the seeds for scale were there for me at a young age. To me the trains don’t have to be exactly perfect like the prototype but reasonably close.

As youngster in my 20s in the mid ‘80s I discovered HO. Wow, no center rail and look at all the ties! The track looks like real railroad track. And the cars all looked like the were in the correct proportions to each other. I built a few HO layouts but never actually finished anything and never actually had the knowledge to get them to run reliably. Soon lost interest in them.

Fast forward to the mid ‘90s and just for giggles I went to a train show. I saw lots of PW and train bug bit hard. So I started collecting PW but PW was not cheap back then like most of it is now. However, before getting too deep into PW those feelings I had as a kid came back to me and at about the same time someone turned me on to MTH Premier. Scaled sized trains. I became totally hooked on O scale sized trains. I built a 3 rail layout but never got to the scenery stage as life got in the way but this time I didn’t forget about the trains. I found out about York through the OGR magazine and joined the TCA. But still that center rail bothered me. In the early 2000s I found out that there was such a thing as O scale 2 rail. I contemplated switching to 2 rail for about a year and then decided to switch. I sold off or converted most of my 3 rail stuff but I still the PW from when I was a kid and when I got into it briefly in the ‘90s. While I have almost never regretted the switch I enjoy a well done layout or model train in any scale no matter how many rails there are. That’s my story into 2 rail.