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The N Scale |
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Model Railroad |
Chapter 1: Getting Hooked
How I got started in the world's greatest hobby
While the process of becoming a model railroader is unique for each of us, there's likely a finite number of common themes: living near railroads, railroad employees in the family, train sets for Christmas, and so on. And so my story may be fairly ordinary; but for what it's worth, here it is.
The first experience to shape my destiny was discovering the Marx tinplate train set my two (much) older brothers had shared when they were young. Sitting in a dusty box at the back of a closet, it seemed rather sad and forgotten. But once I brought it back to life, that clunky, rattling old thing never failed to captivate me as it circled endlessly.
My fascination with the aged little tinplate set did not go unnoticed by my parents, and one Christmas they replaced it with a Tyco HO Scale train set. Wow, a model train of my very own! Although I was already hooked, it served to set the hook that much deeper. A visit to Roadside America in Shartlesville Pennsylvania was also somewhat influential.
Then, in the summer of 1965 I came across Model Railroader magazine in a hobby shop. This was a significant event, as virtually overnight my blossoming interest in toy trains was transformed into a passion for model railroading. It wasn't long before I had a loop of track nailed to an old ping-pong table, followed in short order by switches and buildings and an enormous, 100-pound plaster mountain.
That same year, my father was searching for interesting weekend activities and found the Black River and Western Railroad, which had just started running—and still runs—steam train excursions. To this day I vividly recall my first ride on that train: standing in an open gondola, cinders raining down on me... even at the age of ten, the experience was exhilarating.
The final influential life event was moving to a house in Hopewell that stood a couple of blocks from the Reading Railroad, which at the time was still quite busy with both freight and passenger service. If the weather was nice and I wasn't in the house, it was always easy to find me: I was down at the railroad station watching trains.
Trains, both real and miniature, were in my blood!
Copyright © 2006-2008 by
David K. Smith.
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