Trains were a theme that ran through my childhood. I still love traveling by rail even after riding a roundtrip from Paris to Athens in 1969 on a packed, un-airconditioned train. When I lived in Boston, I would ride the train to New York in preference to flying. It is actually faster to get to mid-town by train than by air.
The small town that I grew up in was defined by the train tracks. The signal gates (or “ding-ding gates” as we called them as children) marked one boundary of the town. The railroad line cut across the edge of the town and a branch of the Raritan River marked another boundary. We lived a short block and a half from the train station. From my bedroom I could hear the ding-ding gates and every train. This was not annoying but gave a pleasant rhythm to my daily routines.
There was a freight siding just beyond the station. The largest business in town was a lumber yard. During World War II, the millwork shop at the lumber yard made wooden ammo boxes for the war effort. It was still quite busy when I was a child in the 1950s, and my brother would regularly raid the millwork shop’s trash bins for bits of lumber usable for his projects. The shop workers welcomed him to forage. It was a gentler time. Freight came during weekdays in the off hours, and from my home I could gear the freight being switched in the yard, cars coupled and uncoupled. All the sounds of a working rail yard writ small.
The post office was in the same area as the train station, and when I was little child, the mail came on the train and the bags were trundled down a slight grade in the parking lot to the post office. Large parcels, luggage and trunks were picked up and shipped from the station through the Railway Express Agency (REA) office. There was no mail delivery. We picked our mail up daily at the post office. I have fond memories of walking the family dog up the street each morning to pick up the mail before going to school.
The station itself was a busy place. Just inside was the paper man. He had stacks of New York papers for sale. Regulars paid the paper man to hold them a paper. My dad was a regular and read The Wall Street Journal every morning while he ate breakfast standing up at the counter in the kitchen. It was my job to get the paper and have it folded by his breakfast every morning. When I got to the station, the paper man knew who I was and would simply hand me a paper so I could rush it home. If the stock market made a significant change up or down, the paper man would be very busy and would sometimes run out of papers available to non pre-paid regulars. There was no Internet to track changing stock prices, so the paper was very important to those who made their living on Wall Street.
The town was home to many New York bankers and stockbrokers. They would ride the train to Hoboken and then take a second train under the Hudson River to Wall Street. There were three trains each morning and others during the rest of the day. The 6:59 was the early train ridden by eager beaver and up-and-comers. The 7:27 was the busiest train, and the 8:02 was the last morning train to the city. This last train was often filled with the true white-shoe bankers. In the Summer I loved to glimpse the outfits on the late train riders. They seemed almost like uniforms – seer sucker suits, tightly woven linen spectator shoes with brown or navy tips and straw hats.
My Very Own Train
The 1950s were the heyday of the model train, and I had my very own Lionel setup. At Christmas, when I was 5-years old, my parents gave me an electric train set. My older brother already had a set and regularly received enhancements to it. My set included an engine, a tender, three freight cars (box, flat and tank) and a caboose. I also had a transformer power plant to run my train and enough track that I could configure my train’s route several ways.
My train provided many hours of enjoyment. I set it up in my bedroom and would run my train eagerly morning, noon, and night. It was as fascinating as a video game. My flat car was used to transport many items – small stuffed toys, tiny wooden animals, small rocks, Tinker Toy connectors or anything else that I wanted to transport on my railroad.
My brother and I merged our railroads and decided to build a larger more complex layout with our combined resources. After a failed attempt to mount our railway in the basement –sawhorses and plywood, we moved our railway to the floor of the attic. We built an elaborate setup. It was not a thing of beauty since it was the work of two children. We did not pay close attention to the scale of buildings or other features.
Despite endless challenges, our trains always ran on time, and the freight always reached its destination. The layout was a trigger for our imaginations. My brother and I created a hideout for bandits on the edge of tracks – furthest from the transformer. It was outsized (not much of a hideout) since it was constructed from Lincoln Logs. The bandits themselves were fashioned from pipe cleaners, so too were the hobos in the nearby hobo jungle. There were many train robberies enacted with the trains racing away from the bandits. Hobos regularly jumped the train and rode the line. We had a station near the transformer. The hobos would jump off just before reaching the station. My favorite feature was the mechanical dairy car that on and off-loaded milk cans. We laid out pastures and a farm space with weird-sized cows to feed the dairy car. There was another car that tilted to offload logs near the farm. There were also some strange mechanical creations fashioned by my brother from his metal Erector Set. For our railroad, we employed all of our mechanical toy construction tools – Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and metal Erector Set pieces.
Like real trains our set fell on hard times during the 1960s when the two owners, my brother and I, turned our attention to other activities. When my parents downsized the home, they got rid of our trains. I have never lost my love of model trains. I always yearned to have a Santa Fe “Warbonnet” engine. The iconic red, yellow and silver engine powered the Super Chief, an all-stainless-steel streamliner running between Chicago and Los Angeles. It was America's most famous and finest train. The Lionel version was highly coveted. About 15 years ago I purchased a German made Marx knock off Santa Fe. I have been a “trainiac” since childhood.
Comments