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farace
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 Posted - January 20 2010 : 10:57:30 PM
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I should have posted in this forum this morning, but I was already late for work.
I'm sort-of new to model railroading. A few years back I bought a couple of bins of old Life-Like stuff from a friend and left it in the basement waiting for my son to grow up a little. He's seven now, and my parents gave him a Bachmann Digital Steam Commander set at some point before Christmas, and then a non-digital Santa Fe set for Christmas (I promptly put an NCE decoder in the engine). Digital was a surprise to me.
So I was watching the train go around the tree, which got me thinking about my great-grandfather, who was an engineer on the New Haven line for fifty years, although I didn't realize it until I was an adult. He died in 1970, shortly before my tenth birthday. I now have his Lifetime Pass that was given to him to commemorate fifty years of service, and a photo of him in 1954, probably on the occasion of his fifty-year anniversary, shaking hands with Patrick McGinnis, the man that gave New Haven its most garish and most famous color scheme, and coincidentally ruined the company. My great-grandfather was kind of gruff, never heard any railroad stories from him. I started digging into that branch of my genealogy and found that his father, too, was a New Haven engineer. I'm still trying to find more information on my family, particularly what trains they may have driven. My mom thinks my great-grandfather drove the New Haven-New York route, but isn't sure.
So I got interested in adding New Haven locomotives and rolling stock to my son's (added to mine) train set, and now have a Bachmann Spectrum H16-44, an Athearn SDP-40 (a locomotive I've since learned New Haven never owned), and the AHM C-Liner with B unit I posted about in another thread. Some boxcars, some cabooses, and seven Athearn streamlined passenger cars. We'll see what else I can add to it in the near future. My son is also getting a kick out of having trains that have a family connection. (I took him on a train ride last weekend. We hopped on the local commuter (pulled by a New Haven-painted GP40-2H, same one pictured here: http://www.cwrr.com/Lounge/Feature/ccr/ccr21.jpg. Half-hour ride into New Haven, a look around Union Station, a half-hour ride home, and the conductor gave me a round trip for the cost of a one-way fare (kids ride free). Can't beat that for $4.50!) I've also been picking up a number of books on the New Haven.
Anyway, I found my way here while researching the AHM locomotive that just arrived from eBay. Don't have much Tyco stuff yet (a Silver Streak with caboose, a BN spotlight car, a boxcar or two), but this stuff has a way of multiplying.
--Bob
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Posted - January 20 2010 : 11:03:39 PM
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Welcome to the forum Bob, great story...
Mike
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Posted - January 21 2010 : 12:55:04 AM
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| i too Agree - GREAT STORY - Welcome to the forum along with the other NEW and regular members - Can't wait to see some of your pics as well as other NEWBIES pics
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farace
Switcher
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Posted - January 21 2010 : 10:17:42 AM
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I probably should have mentioned that I did have a train set, of sorts, when I was a kid. The track was permanently attached to large plastic squares, probably a foot by a foot, and there were six of them, four curves and two straights, so when put together it was one 2x3 piece of plastic with a track running around it. No way to reconfigure it. I don't remember the train itself very well; I think it was supposed to make smoke, but the only smoke I remember was from laying strands of the lead Christmas tree tinsel across the tracks.
I read somewhere recently that in many places people go out trainspotting and are happy if they see a single train. I guess I've been lucky in that respect in that there have always been frequent trains around. Growing up I was within earshot of the train's whistle/horn, and my elementary school's playground was adjacent to the New Haven's tracks. Several times during a single recess a train would go by. We had one of those games that kids make up where passenger trains were "girl trains" and freights were "boy trains" and if, say, a girl train went by, all the boys had to jump up onto the chain-link fence until it passed, and vice-versa. Doesn't make a lot of sense looking back forty-something years later, but neither do many of the playground rhymes we had. Even when I went to college on the east end of Long Island, there was a LIRR station at the corner of the campus. It seems like there have always been trains around, so ever-present that I never really gave them much thought. Until now, of course.
--Bob
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