Nostalgia & Model Trains

Ralph,

Great video, thanks for posting. I have followed your progress for years on YouTube and other places and I really like your layout, very well done.

I myself have loved trains since I was a kid back in the 50's. Today I run mostly the scale items from Lionel and MTH. 

My favorites are steam engines from the mid 30's on, especially super steam. Although My layout is small and will get smaller when I move at the end of the year. My fascination with late steam is still strong and my next layout will be a point to point with a yard. I'm still having fun no matter how it works out. 

Thanks for the great Jasper Rock layout video Ralph, really like those brute SD7/9 and the B&O geeps with the roof top air tanks. The towns and bridges and overall scenic views are awesome. 

I too started with trains at Christmas time. And watching the Rock Island train to St. Louis pass through Vigus, MO while my Dad play semi pro baseball.  

Later it was Lionel trains running the length of the attic, learned a lot about electricity then.

Today, I am my 40th year with the Missouri Pacific/Union Pacific with retirement a year away. The trains downstairs run on a flat non sceniced layout, (maybe next year I will try my hand at scenery!). Still learning a lot about electronics to run the railroad.

I is a rewarding hobby as it can take you back in time, you can recreate images from your past with the ability to tweak the scene at anytime. Whether there is scenery or not, in my minds eye I can see it.

It can also be frustrating tracking down a loose wire. 

And like you, a train always has to end with a caboose!

dan    

Ralph great story and video love the Chessie and B&O, C&O, WM and Conrail. Your story almost fits mine over the diesel era. Steam was phased out all i seen was diesel engines and caboose being on end of train.I don't run without a caboose either and i don't do much steam all thou i do have a couple of steam engines and i try to stay in the late 60's to early 80's era.   

Great layout & video.

My layouts reflect nothing past 1959. Even though I rode the PennCentral between Phila and NYC on many business trips during the '60s pulled by a dirty/black PC GG1, I have no desire to have one on a layout. A freight train without a caboose? Forget it.

These days I travel Amtrak between Phila and D.C., and Phila and Boston to visit family. The ride is very nice, but I have no desire to own models of same.

The simple answer is the fond memories of O-Gauge trains as a kid. That feel9ing has never left me but become more intense as I have more time to work on the layout now.

This thread and this photo, taken this morning, seemed to fit in. Daughter, grandson, and new granddaughter are with us for a time while dad does major house repairs. I remember as a kid lying on the floor watching trains, and grandson seems to have inherited the desire. Add the nostalgia of a 50's F3 and a 57 Chevy, and, well, you don't get much more nostalgia than that!

My latest acquisition takes me right back to my childhood when I stood by the tracks, ice cream cone in hand from the Pevely Dairy, and watched the Frisco's Meter roar by pulled by the 4501. It's true that MTH's version is a S. Fe 2900 class 4-8-4, but you can't have everything.  Lew Schneider

My toy trains provide nostalgia in two ways.  First, my layout models a small town in the 1950s - fictional, but based very much on the place I was born and the towns I lived in growing up.  It is a return home to my childhood in a way.

The second form of nostalgia is perhaps more important to my mental health -  I "return to childhood" when I play with my toy trains.  I just forget about my job and the other things that seem to pester me, and enjoy.  Some days I come home from work and tell my wife I have to "de-compress" from work for an hour with my trains.   I really "play" in a childlike way - pure fun, undisciplined in a way.  During a big project, my workshop becomes a huge, and mean huge, mess: I just put whatever tool I am done with down right where I am rather than return it to its drawer or hanger(often creating a problem finding it the next time I need it).  The floor of the workshop and of the aisles in my layout is the designated area to store anything and everything no longer needed - I throw the odd unneeded scrapes of wood and track, and plastic pieces on the floor, etc., to the point they are occasionally covered with stuff.  (I wear heavy shoes).  Hard to put any price on that. 

(And yes, when done with the project, then I clean up everything and put it all away).

If I go back to the beginning, to my earliest interest in railroading and my subsequent immersion in the hobby, I was the typical kid, who wanted to be the engineer of The Mountaineer, in control of all that power, always traveling to exotic destinations and in control of where I was headed, pushing levers and throttles. As a kid in the era of billboard boxcars, my imagination of where "Everywhere West" was or who was Ma & Pa was, or where the "Northern Pacific" was, drove me in wonder, as if the whole nation was rolling past me, full of mysteries and intrigue. The fellow waving from his little rolling "house" at the end of the train I envied. 

I was hooked. To a very young me, this was all magical. Going to the station, there was the operator with all sorts of gadgets, seemingly doing important mysterious stuff. I don't reflect much on any of this unless the subject comes up around nostalgia, and honestly ( this may sound goofy) but "it" just is. I still want to be the engineer, and be a player albeit in a smaller scale. 

I was born in an eastern Pennsylvania coal town, so my interest in the Reading, Lehigh Valley, Erie and PRR is a given.

Later, we moved to a college town where my father earned his Bachelor's degree.  A DL&W line ran through it, along with the PRR.

Finally, Dad got a job in a small town in central PA, with the 4-track PRR main line running through it.  I spent many an hour down at the station, watching those long, long PRR freights (and passenger trains!) roaring through.

Given this background, I guess the Pennsylvania focus of my modeling interest isn't hard to explain.  Although I'm also attracted to the NYC, even though I never saw the Central in action.

Like many others here, the main focus of my collecting is postwar non-scale.  I got my first Lionel locomotive from Santa (a 2026) in 1951, and throughout my early years, I always drooled over the Lionel catalogs, wanting far more than my family's limited budget could possibly accommodate.  I've pretty well got all those locomotives that I could only dream about, years ago.

But I've also accumulated some scale Lionel locomotives (6220; 1973 CP F3; 1993 Reading Fairbanks-Morse) and Standard O rolling stock to go with them.  I run both scale and non-scale trains, but I never mix them -- it looks too silly.  And I have zero interest in any digital command-control system whatever.

As for the period, well, it was a bleak day for me when the PRR and NYC fell to the cursed Penn Central and the other northeastern roads started dropping, one by one.  So I don't go beyond about 1955 on my layout.

Partly nostalgia, partly historical interest, partly the pleasure of restoration, partly the enjoyment of miniature modeling, partly the pride in keeping all the trains well-maintained and smooth-running.  So I guess I don't really have a single answer to the original question.

Ralph M started this thread by stating his love of trains. I was born into families employed by the mighty PRR. On my Dad's side, both my grandfather(conductor) and g grandfather (yardmaster) worked their whole lives on the Pennsy.....mostly out of Pittsburgh and Conway Yard. I remember one story about one of Pap's buddies being turned down for passenger service as a conductor. The reason......"extreme ugliness".

Can you imagine any employer getting away with THAT? 

Om my Mom's side....her grandfather worked for the PRR prior to WWI, then mined coal because there were fewer layoffs.....then was drafted into railroad service during WWI. Most of the other family members worked mining coal or at Bethlehem Steel in Johnstown.

When I came along, toys trains were the gift of choice. My 2 brothers had trains, too. Most of what we had survived our rough play back in the 1950s. All this has contributed to my addiction to trains .......1/48 scale and full size, as well! Tom