A brief history:
I don’t really know when or how I was bitten by the train bug. It might have been a combination of events over many years. My maternal grandparents ran a short line railroad in Port Townsend, WA. I have memories of getting to go out on a run and driving the engine. The were also trips in the tiny runabout. But most of those memories are vague and fleeting. Maybe it was the toy battery operated train I received as a gift that had track, turnouts, and a “control board” that changed the train speed, and direction. That train and its cars sit on a short piece of the plastic track on my office bookshelf today as a reminder of the fun I had playing with it.
I think the big boost to my train addiction came from when my father pulled out his collection of Lionel trains and set them up in our Chicago townhouse basement. I’d get to play with them for a while then they had to be taken down. Eventually I was allowed to setup the trains and take them down. My mother would drive me through the crazy Chicago traffic to a Lionel train shop so I could spend my hard earned money on a new engine or some track. I couldn’t afford the real nice stuff but I was happy with what I could buy. My father found a position at LSU and when my mother told me we were moving to Louisiana, she presented me with a Louisiana boxcar for the train collection. The new house in Baton Rouge had a spare room that eventually came to be called the “train room” as I usually had the Lionel trains setup in there. One year as a gift my father and my uncle made me train tables - a couple of 4x8 tables with 2x4 legs. I later added two more 4x8 tables that were constructed by my Boy Scout troop for the regional scout show. We put on a display for the railroading merit badge and my Lionel trains were part of the display layout. I say “my” Lionel trains as by this time I was the main user, maintainer and keeper of the train parts.
By my junior year of high school I had stopped playing with the trains. Cars, girls, and college took center stage. The trains were packed up and stored away. Fast forward 30ish years to today and here I am writing a blog about rediscovering the fun of playing with trains. I now have a wife and three kids in a small house in the lovely town of Urbana, IL. The discovery that we were expecting our first child gave me the excuse I needed to do something I always thought would be cool but could never come up with a strong enough reason to do it. Build a train around the inside perimeter of a room. Since we needed to remodel a room into a nursery, why not add a train? But what kind of train? O gauge seemed to industrial and had the potential for high-speed derailments at 7ft up. HO and N wouldn’t be visible. G was too large.. But Wait! LEGO makes trains?? How cool. That seemed like the perfect solution and it was. So it came to be.
Here is the expecting father playing with newly acquired LEGO trains.
Oh how young I was back then.
Here is the happy Engineer with his LEGO steam train.
The winters in East Central Illinois can be long and most of my hobbies involve the outdoors and I really don’t like the cold so I needed to find something to do inside that would be fun and a distraction. Building a model railroad seemed like a great idea! But what gauge? Do I unpack the old Lionel and make a go of it? We are pretty well packed into our house and looking around the various rooms, I couldn’t find any space to build a train layout in 0 gauge or even Z. We use every inch of our house space.
I don’t really know when or how I was bitten by the train bug. It might have been a combination of events over many years. My maternal grandparents ran a short line railroad in Port Townsend, WA. I have memories of getting to go out on a run and driving the engine. The were also trips in the tiny runabout. But most of those memories are vague and fleeting. Maybe it was the toy battery operated train I received as a gift that had track, turnouts, and a “control board” that changed the train speed, and direction. That train and its cars sit on a short piece of the plastic track on my office bookshelf today as a reminder of the fun I had playing with it.
I think the big boost to my train addiction came from when my father pulled out his collection of Lionel trains and set them up in our Chicago townhouse basement. I’d get to play with them for a while then they had to be taken down. Eventually I was allowed to setup the trains and take them down. My mother would drive me through the crazy Chicago traffic to a Lionel train shop so I could spend my hard earned money on a new engine or some track. I couldn’t afford the real nice stuff but I was happy with what I could buy. My father found a position at LSU and when my mother told me we were moving to Louisiana, she presented me with a Louisiana boxcar for the train collection. The new house in Baton Rouge had a spare room that eventually came to be called the “train room” as I usually had the Lionel trains setup in there. One year as a gift my father and my uncle made me train tables - a couple of 4x8 tables with 2x4 legs. I later added two more 4x8 tables that were constructed by my Boy Scout troop for the regional scout show. We put on a display for the railroading merit badge and my Lionel trains were part of the display layout. I say “my” Lionel trains as by this time I was the main user, maintainer and keeper of the train parts.
By my junior year of high school I had stopped playing with the trains. Cars, girls, and college took center stage. The trains were packed up and stored away. Fast forward 30ish years to today and here I am writing a blog about rediscovering the fun of playing with trains. I now have a wife and three kids in a small house in the lovely town of Urbana, IL. The discovery that we were expecting our first child gave me the excuse I needed to do something I always thought would be cool but could never come up with a strong enough reason to do it. Build a train around the inside perimeter of a room. Since we needed to remodel a room into a nursery, why not add a train? But what kind of train? O gauge seemed to industrial and had the potential for high-speed derailments at 7ft up. HO and N wouldn’t be visible. G was too large.. But Wait! LEGO makes trains?? How cool. That seemed like the perfect solution and it was. So it came to be.
Oh how young I was back then.
The winters in East Central Illinois can be long and most of my hobbies involve the outdoors and I really don’t like the cold so I needed to find something to do inside that would be fun and a distraction. Building a model railroad seemed like a great idea! But what gauge? Do I unpack the old Lionel and make a go of it? We are pretty well packed into our house and looking around the various rooms, I couldn’t find any space to build a train layout in 0 gauge or even Z. We use every inch of our house space.
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