The recent stories/comments by Randy Danniel, Loren Johnson, Mike
Griesmann, and Steven Levine (hope I'm not forgetting anyone) are a
reminder of how important it is to share our interest/love/knowledge of
trains (or indeed any other special skills or knowledge, especially of
things that are disappearing from the mainstream culture) with our children
-- not in the sense of pushing it on them (the Worst possible thing to do)
but by sharing stories, nurturing interests, and doing neat stuff together.
The following autobiographic account of how the roots of my own interest in
railroads and model railroading were planted (something I wrote for a
friend last year) show what a wonderful, positive influence a parent's
taking an interest can have.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::
I suspect that most of us who love trains were bitten by that bug at a very
tender age; I certainly was. And I think in retrospect we often can see our
future predilections by taking note of our earliest memories. Some of my
very earliest memories are of train trips -- going from Chicago to
Philadelphia on the Trailblazer to visit my mother's relatives, or to St.
Paul on the Hiawatha to visit my father's family. After we had found our
seats and stowed our luggage, my father used to carry me up the platform on
his shoulders to see the locomotives. I was born in 1947, so some of these
still were steam -- enormous, awesome, terrible (in the Biblical sense) to
my two-year old eyes. Even at that age I think I had an intuitive sense of
the raw power that was held there under pressure. Somehow I understood that
the whole think could explode at any instant. At one point it almost did --
or so it seemed to me. I can't remember whether the pop valve let go or
whether it was the engine's whistle. But in the confines of the Union
Station shed it must have been about the loudest thing I'd ever heard. It
startled and scared me, of course, but instead of crying, I channeled all
of that adrenalin back into my vocal chords and screamed back at locomotive
as loud as I could -- a story my father would delight in telling years
later.
He was undoubtedly the one who kindled and nurtured my love of trains as
well as of model building. (Let me say that I also owe my mother a great
deal, especially my involvement with music; and both my parents fed another
passion -- my love of and interest in food -- although in entirely
different ways; but that's another story). My dad was not a model
railroader or even a railfan in the conventional sense, although he seemed
to know far too much not to have been somewhere in his past. He told me
once that he used to stand on the viaduct over the Great Northern's tracks
when he was a boy to watch the passing locomotives (he also said he quit,
disillusioned, when GN converted many of them to oil burners!). But he
loved the outdoors, and (when I was older) he was happy to go trundling
around with me, hiking old roadbeds, exploring ruins, and taking pictures.
And he liked to build things. He was a biologist at the University of
Chicago, and like many scientists of his generation, he had to be adept at
making his own equipment for experiments. He was a good glassblower in
particular, and when I was very small he would set me on top of his work
bench at the lab and make me glass animals out of Pyrex. Most got broken
over the years, but I still have a few treasured remnants. Later, when I
was in my (almost obligatory) dinosaur phase, and we'd exhausted the small
inventory they had for sale at the Field Museum, he started making me lost
wax castings of new and unusual species. He'd take me to the paleontology
library at U of C; we'd read about all the different kinds and decide which
ones to make; then he'd sketch the selected critter on a 3x5 card and make
a paraffin model of it. Next, he'd suspend the wax master in the center of
a small box with long pins and fill it with plaster of Paris. When it had
set and he'd removed the cardboard sides and pulled out the pins, he'd
stick the plaster box into his lab oven overnight. He never poured out the
wax; I guess it just got absorbed into the plaster. After the mold was
thoroughly baked, he'd cut a hole in the top with a scalpel and melt old
pieces of type metal, which he'd gotten from shop men he knew at the
University Press, over a Bunsen Burner. After pouring and cooling
sufficiently, he'd give me a scalpel so I could excavate my new friend --
just like a paleontologist on a dig. Wow!
Of course we made lots of models on the kitchen table in the evenings (as I
recall, mostly he made them while I watched impatiently). He didn't care
much for the newer, plastic kits by Revell and the like -- thought they
were cheap and shoddy. So mostly what we (he) built were wooden models
(remember those old Strombecker kits? Lots of planing and sanding and
plastic wood and more sanding and sanding sealer and dope). They seemed to
take forever, but he was right; they did hold up better than the plastic
ones. There was no special bias toward trains at this stage, although we
certainly built some. But we built at least as many airplanes and old
automobiles, even a few ships.
I did get an American Flyer train set when I was about 5 or 6. All my
friends had steam engines with freight cars (naturally), so I asked my
parents for a diesel passenger train. In a sense this adumbrated my entry
into the hobby, since even then I was much more intellectually engaged with
the equipment, its aesthetics, and its authenticity than most children, and
also obviously I was following the beat of my own, very different drummer.
At the same time, it was an egregious error of judgment, which I grasped
almost at once. For however handsome that shiny ALCO PA may have been, I
understood sadly too late that the drumbeat I should have followed was that
of my own heart, which was run by steam (that was something I recognized
once and for all a few years later -- see below). And there was another
problem I hadn't anticipated. With just a circle of track there was nothing
to do except watch the train run. I craved activity (another prescient
sign). So I rather quickly went back to playing with my Skaneateles (sp?
forerunner of Brio). At least they had switches, which allowed me to
operate a railroad, even if it meant moving the cars with my bare hand.
The real revelation came during the summer of 1955 -- a turning point in
many ways. One advantage of my father's job was that it allowed us to take
really good summer vacations. The university and my school both ran on the
quarter system, and the academic year didn't start until early October. So
we tended to travel late, often after Labor Day. We were in the habit of
alternating directions, going east one year (my mother's preference) and
west the next (my father's). That summer we drove out to Colorado, spending
most of our time there in Rocky Mountain National Park and Mesa Verde.
There was no interstate highway system then and no air conditioning in our
1947 Olds. It was just two and a half, long, hot,
stuck-behind-cattle-trucks, bugs-on-the-windshield days on two-lane
blacktop to reach the mountains. West of Omaha, US 30 paralleled the Union
Pacific tracks for hundreds of miles through one whistlestop/grain
elevator/alfalfa drier town after another, and it was there I saw steam
locomotives working -- really working -- for the first time. The effect on
me was immediate, profound, and permanent.
Traffic density was higher in those days, and maybe we were on the leading
edge of the fall grain rush. Whatever the reason, there were lots of
trains, a good 50% of them steam powered. I can't recall how many different
engine types I saw, but there were a bunch of them, articulateds and long
rigid-frame engines, and several double-headers. It was especially exciting
when we caught up to a westbound freight. From the rear end you could just
see a little smoke -- or maybe it was only diesel exhaust, you couldn't
tell. My father, who was a really good driver, somehow always managed to
maneuver us up the line, passing countless cars and trucks until we were
alongside the locomotive. When it was steam, I was awestruck.
I don't need to convince you of the vitality and uniqueness of a steam
locomotive. I feel lucky to have been born in time to have known just a
little of it. Each time I saw one that summer, the totality overwhelmed me.
I think the sounds and smells were at least as potent an intoxicant as the
sight of it. And the sight was pretty amazing. Apart from the thick
fragrant coal smoke and the complex exhaust music on a bed of hissing and
whining and whirring sounds of steam, I think what most struck me was the
unexpected sight of the fireboxes' red flashing glow, which was the source
of it all.
I have no doubt that was the moment when I was hooked for life, though I
still didn't completely realize it -- that epiphany would come 5 years
later. Still, perhaps I would have become obsessively involved in trying to
recreate it in miniature even then, had not something else happened on that
trip which was even more amazing and transformative (and which in its own
way, ultimately, turned out to be just as influential on my model
building).
That something was Mesa Verde. I don't know whether you've ever been there.
I hear it's become impossibly crowded now. Too bad, but I guess it's
neither possible nor fair to hide something that good forever. It's my
favorite of all our National Parks. I've been there maybe a half dozen
times over the years, and always I learn something and come away enchanted
by the natural environment and astounded at how much they have been able to
deduce about the ancient people's lives and history. The ruins are
remarkable, not only the cliff dwellings themselves, but the earlier ruins
and excavations on top of the mesa, where you can see how their settlements
evolved from the earliest pit houses to small stone structures to the
complex "apartments" characteristic of the final phase. The museum, in
addition to its many exhibits showing the evolution of tools, pottery
(perhaps the most fascinating sequence) and every other aspect of land and
life, has a series of exquisite dioramas which show the ruins as they would
have appeared during their historical occupance.
Standing in front of the last of these, which portrayed Cliff Palace House
as it was 800 years ago, filled with life and activity, my father turned to
me and said, "Would you like to build one of those?" Well, what could I
say? So when we got back to Chicago, we went to his lab one Sunday, and
down to the shop in the basement of the building, where he made a plywood
box about 3 feet wide by 3 feet tall by eighteen inches deep. He stapled in
some chicken wire to make a frame for the cliffs, stuffed a little crumpled
newspaper behind the wire mesh, and we started covering it with plaster. I
was disappointed and I guess a little surprised that we didn't finish it
that day, but it turned out that was part of the point (he explained later
that his hidden agenda had been to teach me patience). Indeed we didn't
even finish plastering the cliffs for about a month (we only worked on it
Sundays), and it was a good while after that before we finished all the
buildings (which were framed with wire mesh and plastered in the same way).
The whole project ended up taking almost 9 months to complete, as we read
about the Anasazi and their modern Pueblo Indian descendents, and addressed
all the practical problems of making human figures (we used plasticine with
pipe-cleaner armatures), pinon pine trees, corn stalks, turkey feather
blankets -- you name it. In a remarkable coincidence, my third grade
teacher that year had himself just come from a decade or so teaching on the
Hopi reservation and did a great deal to bring that culture to life for me
and keep me fascinated by it.
How well my father succeeded in teaching me patience is questionable. But
the project firmly implanted in me a love of the American west, of
landscapes, and of American Indian cultures.
In terms of my future career as a model railroader, it also demystified
many aspects of scenery building. Later, in high school, when we had a
model railroad club, the other boys were intimidated by scenicking our
layout. So I said, OK, I'll just do it. I ordered all the materials,
supervised the work crews and painted all the backdrops myself.
Railroads remained part of my interests for the next several years, though
they were not central. That all changed in 1960, on another Colorado
vacation, when we drove over a couple former rights of way (Boreas Pass and
Marshall Pass) that had been converted to dirt roads. I think my folks were
mostly interested in seeing the scenery. I was fascinated by the old
buildings, and something in me stirred then, although the blinding lights
of revelation didn't flash right away. They did a few days later, though,
when we reached Silverton around mid-day and I saw a live steam engine
again for the first time in 5 years. All it took was the smell of burning
coal and hot grease to bring all my memories flooding back. I begged my
parents to let me ride the train. There were no seats available, but the
conductor said I could ride in the baggage car, which I did, right behind
the locomotive. I arrived in Durango, three hours later, a confirmed
railfan for life.
There's more, particularly about how I became interested in the Q, but the
real point is to cherish the memories you have; they don't last forever.
And share them with the next generation.
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CBQ/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
CBQ-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
|