What did they use to talk about in the postwar days?

The 40's were the best time of my life. Teenager living in Manhattan with money. WOW would I like to go back.

Willie was the best, hands down. 

 

Only if you were a Giant Fan

Mays or Duke couldn't carry Mantles bat to the plate. Hands down Mantle. I was there and I saw.....

Is UTAH in the United States?

Nope we are part of the State of Deseret . Its not too bad, having wives wives makes up for the cheap beer

 So was I.  We had the option of walking to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium.  Saw them both play many times.  Mantle's Yankees won more champeenships, but that's because baseball is a team sport and Casey Stengel was their manager.  As players Mantle and Mays were pretty much straight up equals, with a smidge of an edge to Willie.  Duke was good too, but it was a long walk to Brooklyn from Washington Heights so we didn't see so much of him.

When it came to trains it was about which was better, American Flyer or Lionel.  Just like the Mantle - Mays situation there was no right answer.

Pete

In the late 50s/early 60s we talked about various operational issues whenever we ran our trains. There were several kids with Lionel and/or Marx. We were always trying to figure out how to doublehead Lionel steamers. Another issue was car order to get the most cars in a train and have it stay on the rail around curves. And of course we commiserated about the decline of quality in the Lionel line after 1955.

Then the big issue became HO gauge, whether or not to switch, put the toys away and go for realistic scale. I took that route, eventually laying my own Tru-Track.

That was before girls and guitars put the railroad in limbo until 1978 when the old Lionel came out for a Christmas reprise, and it would not run. It's a long story.

Post war era???   There was waaay too much other stuff competing with the trains for a young kid to get concerned.  When I did hear older folks talk about trains, it usually revolved around standard gauge or ??? from the 19th century!   My only gripe was that I could not get enough money for that big New Haven EP5 Jet 2350 Lionel electric!  The lack of six wheel trucks was not an issue yet.  OTOH, everything else I wanted was even more money, and thus doubly not-available...like a big 2331 Blue Virginian Train Master or a 2353/83 Santa Fe F3 set.  I was stuck for years with a Marx/ All-State 666 steamer that sucked more canal water than you could possibly imagine!  (except for the smoke unit) A Dieselover's worst nightmare come true!

they talked about how good HO scale was going to be.-jim

What did the guys who were collecting and running toy trains talk about in the post-war era????  Welll......lessee...pretty much the same things we talk about today...

The Collecting Hobby

" ...The rapidity with which, in recent years, this hobby-which originally was little more than a specialized bypath- has increased, has astounded even its most enthusiastic early followers. The collecting hobby actually got under way in the early and middle 1930's, just about the same time that model railroading itself was first gaining widespread attention and acceptance as a serious adult hobby. Prior to World War II the number of active collectors was not inconsiderable. Since the war years, however, they have mushroomed upon every side, yet there is every evidence that even now the hobby is but in its very infancy."

Realism as a Factor in Value

  "The historically minded collector of old trains is not primarily interested in whether or not a given locomotive or other unit is a good model, but rather in its rarity. He distinguishes a realistic model from a poor model to some extent, of course. Likewise there is not a question that a great deal of the initial interest in Ives models was spurred by their superior realism. It is also true that some of the rarest and most desirable models are among the most realistic and, unless a collector is going to be too critical from a purely scale model realism standpoint, are beautiful models. Equally beautiful in another sense to the collector, however, is the rare model, even though it may conceivably exhibit, at best, only a rather tenuous resemblance to a real locomotive. The old models take on a beauty and an attractiveness of appearance to the collector, which has little or no connections with their rating as models as such."

Collecting Series of Cars

  "...Here the discussion enters one of the most fascinating and widely popular aspects of collecting: the building up of a series of the lithographed freight cars made by American Flyer, Bing, Ives, and others, in different heralds. It is possible, indeed probable, that in the years to come, collectors will as avidly try to build up sets of the current American Flyer, Kusan-Auburn, Lionel, and Marx plastic freight cars in their different heralds and road names, and that is as it should be. Yet it can strongly be doubted if these cars will ever quite equal the older lithographed cars in the latter's ever-increasing wealth of all the glamorous associations, all the fascination and romance of bygone days in model train manufacture, which to most collectors seems inherently and almost illimitably bound up in the very words, "lithographed cars."

From Collecting Model Trains - Hertz

...and every last one of the above quotes was cussed and discussed ad infinitum back in the day along with all of the other usual suspects - catalog collecting, catalog correctness, repaints, restorations, reproductions, proper packing for shipping, dampness as an enemy, quantities of models available, etc.

Now Texas Pete are you trying to tell me you walked from Washington Heights to Yankee Stadium? What bridge did you walk across?

It's not a bad walk, Ed. The Macombs Dam Bridge is a direct connection. I used to walk from just north of the stadium in the Bronx over to the Polo Grounds (but not after dark ).

Jim

The "controversy" in our family from about 1965-1985 went something like this.  After growing up with O27 stuff, my Dad switched to the dark side and went with HO for around the Christmas tree.  Nothing permanent, but he was nearly thrown out of the family for leaving 3-rail.  My Grandpa has the smaller O27 Lionel with many of the postwar classics, and my Uncle had the larger O-Gauge like the Santa Fe F3s and Virginian Trainmaster.

All I remember was the fun we had with their carpet layouts from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Not a lot of discussion on realism or scale modeling.  In today's terms, they had runners and we ran them a lot.

They talked about how silly people would be in the future.....

I don't know about everyone else, but we 8 train guys talked about h ow to double head steam engines , none of us could do it right, the steam had to whistle, smoke and run fast.

Finally I cut an opening in my UP alco, and my dad said I ruined it, but we ran it behind my 773 and 736,,,,so much for growing up.

Then we played baseball or basket ball. When tired of all this we shot it out playing cowboys and Indians. By now it was supper time, my mom never knew how many were there for supper, but we always ate enough, and there was always cake and icecream  homemade , we never ate bought cake or icecream, we saved that money for trains.

Rod

How much better Lionel is than American Flyer.

I grew up in the 1960's and we played with our trains in the winter months. My brother and I would fill our basement floor with Lionel and Marx 027 track, we would start around the couch and work our way around the Washer and dryer and by the Mangle. I bet kids today would not know what a Mangle was. My family had six children and and a lot of sheets that needed to be pressed. My Mother thought this machine was a gift from God, I hated this machine, it would hiss and steam would come out during use.

Our thoughts about trains started around September and we would look at the Lionel and Marx offerings and hoped that we could pick something out for Christmas. My brother and I loved to think about Military items that Lionel would have in the catalog, we thought the Russians were coming and we wanted our train arsenal to be ready for invasion. The 1960's was a bad time for Lionel, almost everything had plastic trucks and couplers we wanted the older metal trucks. In these days we dreamed about,  large steam engines like the 773, 746, 736 and FM's and also the GG1's. We saved all of our money from Birthdays and summer jobs to buy Lionel and Marx train items. We would go to G.C. Murphy's and buy track and telephone poles for between 5 and 10 cents per item. Life was much easier then, I wish my children could have enjoyed the less stressful life style we had then.

In ending I would like to wish you all a Happy 4th of July and thanks for listening to by babble.

Thanks

Pat

WWW.PATSTRAINS.COM

Now this man had his priorities straight!

In my childhood neighborhood in greater Pittsburgh, we didn't talk so much - if at all - about which was better but about how they were different. That is, AF was smaller in stature, which seemd to us children as less robust, and then there were those white-walls on a steam locomtive my dear friend and immediate neighbor had. Well, at least he had his own train; I just had my father's at Christmas. No complaints anywhere, there, though.

When I was young, my job on laundry day was to turn the handle on the mangle. We didn't have a dryer, so the mangle was used first to extract most of the water before sheets were hung on the line to dry. Ours was not a powered device, but was hand cranked. It was hard work, but we ended up with beautifully pressed sheets and clothes. 

Well, culturally speaking, people simply didn't blather all the time, about anything,

unless you were odd. And, at least in my part of the country, manners were actually

expected, and bad behavior was punished. We were more about doing than talking.

Nothing will hide information faster than an excess of communication.

I started out with a Lionel 2183WS set which I still have and still run today

Guys and Gals,

When I was a child in the 60's that was (before the Beatles came over) I can remember being out until after dark, not locking the front door, riding a bike on a torn up section of side walk and calling it a wheelie bump into the bushes, riding to "the other side" of the railroad tracks, fishing with killees of my dock, there wasn't much too do but being kids we would dream up things to do. And when it got colder in the wintertime we would go down to the basement to play with my American Flyer Trains.

They were good old days that was before the Vietnam War. Before Kennedy was shot.....It was a world and a half away, it seemed. It was during the World's Fair. Those were the happiest times of my life. Just before my grandparents (on my father's side) died.  Then things began to change rapidly.

I agree with D500 we were more about doing than talking. More about being active than sitting on the couch.

Mike Maurice

Also, in the old days, they didn't have "Forums" better yet computers to "talk" about trains on.  I grew up in the late 50's and 60's.  Only two houses in the neighborhood had permanent train layouts...one neighbor had an HO layout mounted on a 4' x 8' piece of plywood and the other neighbor had a small Lionel layout in his garage.  As mentioned by others, we played outside most of the time...as long as the weather was good.  Even the two that had "layouts" didn't "talk" much about trains.  "Train season" started when the bad weather started.  Most people only pulled out small trains sets to put around the Christmas tree.  Matt

Exactly Matt. I'm surprised no one said it before you. And it is not to be understated: There was NO internet back then and therefore NO train forums like this and others. Folks tend to be nicer to people you are actually talking to face to face, versus the anonymity of the internet.

Plus, as others mentioned, a lot of us were kids back then and kids talk differently than adults.

And, if by chance, you did have a problem with a train item that was either defective or not working properly, you went to a Lionel dealer and talked with HIM about it, rather than letting off steam about the problem by denouncing the entire company that made the product in public via the internet.

In addition to all that, I think in general our expectations were lower, which isn't a bad thing. We didn't exect Lionel or any other company to introduce several dozen items in every catalog that were made from totally new tooling. Nor were our parents about to buy us every single train item we day-dreamed about having. Nor were we as critical: blasting the train companies for making typos, overlooking our own typos we make in posting on this very forum.

And times were by far more innocent and simplier. Today, some people grumble about anything and everything that is wrong with their trains, or even trains they don't even own. Funny, but back then, that postwar bicycle buzzer in the engines sounded like a REAL train horn as the air whistle tender sounded like the REAL thing. Ah, the power of childhood imagination.

Mays did then and will always leave Mantle in his dust.

We grew up poor and I was given an HO starter set by one of my wealthy aunts. However momma was too scared that I would burn down the house with the transformer, that I never was allowed to play trains. So when I was about 17 or so and had a job, I bought my first Lionel train set. 

This is a thoughtful question.  But as others have mentioned, I just don't remember us as kids in the late fifties/early sixties talking about anything in particular all that much.  Several of the boys had Lionel or American Flyer trains (in about a 3-to-1 ratio) and a few had permanent layouts.  HO didn't hit our neighborhood until 1959-60. But we didn't actually talk about the trains to the best of my recollection.  We just played in the same ways that others have mentioned. 

Flyer wasn't an issue in my town, tucked into comfortable, suburban, North Jersey.

We couldn't even get it if we wanted.  Nope, if you wanted two rails, you lined up for HO, my man!  Athearn/Globe rubber band F7s, Revell NW2s, Lionel Virginian Rectifiers, and the all time champ....Varney Dockside!  Mine was New Haven - McGinnis orange!!