Hello, my name is Stephen and I have a train problem... My train "problem" started around the time of Christmas of 1969. I was 6-years old and we lived in Oak Park, Illinois. That December my Father and my Grandfather (who was visiting from Seattle) were busy in the basement building a secret project that would shape the future of my love of trains. Dad and Grandpa were building an O-gauge layout for a Lionel set my father had purchased for me as a Christmas present.
Not sure if mine was the Sears set but the construct is familiar to my recollection.
The layout was built on a 4x8 sheet of plywood with 12" of it attached to the wall and hinges that allowed the 3' section to be tilted up when not in use. The layout was an oval track with a paper mache mountain towards the back wall that featured a tunnel through the mountain. The mountain had a miniature village with small lighted buildings. The train set featured a steam locomotive, coal car, a tanker car, a boxcar, and a red caboose. The locomotive had liquid drops you could put in the stack to simulate smoke. To a seven-year-old it was magic!
I played with that train for hours and imagined the people riding the train and the people living in the houses up on the hill. I've never been able to figure out where that train went, I'm guessing it was left with the house when we moved a couple years later. Maybe there is someone out there whose parents bought a house in Oak Park around 1972 that remembers finding a magic train track in their basement.
After Oak Park, we moved to a little town outside Seattle called Goldbar Washington. In Goldbar, my miniature train and paper mache mountain was replaced with the real thing. Every day the freight trains of the Great Northern Railroad would thunder past our house. My Dad purchased a Mobil station and house that was facing highway US-2. On the other side of the 2-lane highway was a pair of active Great Northern Railroad train tracks.
Sharpe's Service Mobil Station Gold Bar, WA. (circa 1973). Full-Service Gas, Ice Cream, Sandwiches, Eggs, and Honey. The Mobil Pegasus you see in the pic is hanging in my living room today.
50 years later the Sharpe Service building (and my childhood home next door) are still standing. Across Highway 2 you can see the Great Northern Railroad Tracks and the Skykomish River.
Goldbar was an old logging, mining, and railroad town surrounded by land originally owned by the Great Northern Railroad that was later sold to Freidrich Wayerhauser founder of Weyhauser Timber Company. At one point Great Northern Railroad had a switchyard in Goldbar as it sat at the foot of the Cascades and was a busy hub leading in and out of the port town of Everette Washington just north of Seattle.
In Goldbar my basement train had come to life by real trains passing by several times a day! As kids we played on the tracks (against mom's strict orders), we placed pennies on the tracks (against any common sense), and we jumped from the railroad bridge into the cold water of the Skykomish river (that was probably the most dangerous activity of the three.) These were glory days as a little kid and I fondly remember hearing trains pass by on a regular basis.
But as it turns out owning a small-town gas station during an Opec oil embargo is not the best way to support a family, so a few years later my Dad took a sales job in Pennsylvania and I would finally get my first ride on a train. And what a ride it was! My Dad loaded my Mom, sisters, and myself onto an East-bound train while my Dad drove a second-hand Sears & Robuck truck loaded with all our household belongings headed for the outskirts of Philadelphia. (Us kids called the truck "Ears & Buck" due to the first letters of each name being painted over before the truck auction.) My memory of this cross-country voyage was sitting in the lounge car looking out the windows watching the country roll by in a magnificent Ansel Adams-worthy winter scape.
The Amtrack version of the El Capitan circa 1972. In the winter of '72 we traveled by train from Everett, WA to King of Prussia, PA. I was 9 years old and I remember the spectacular views from the lounge car windows.
In Pennsylvania, my freight trains were gone and they were replaced by the commuter trains of the Philadelphia "Main Line". These trains delivered businessmen from their homes in the suburbs to their office jobs in downtown Philadelphia. While growing up in Pennsylvania I remember we used to stop at a little hotdog diner called "Jimmy Johns" on Route 202 in West Chester PA. The highlight of each visit for me was watching the Jimmy Johns trains as they circled the dining area.
I also have fond memories of my Dad taking me to the National Toy Train Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg PA near Lancaster County, PA. The Train Museum's display made me think that maybe one day I too could have a train to enjoy in my home just like we did back in Oak Park.
