I was at the Port Byron rest stop on the Thruway, en route to the Syracuse show, getting coffee on Saturday morning when I noticed that the rebrand had gone live. NMRA leadership has been teasing it for weeks, without showing anything. The train show kept me busy all day, of course, but when I got to the hotel that night, I dug in for a closer look.
Ugh.
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I joined the HO club downtown last year. Hey, why not? I’ve got some rolling stock, the club’s just a short drive away, and I already know many of the members. For the club’s annual open house, member trains must meet strict mechanical standards: metal wheels throughout, metal-shank knuckle couplers, NMRA weight recommendations, and so on.
My motley collection of old Tyco streamlined cabooses doesn’t even come close to complying. I decided to run some anyway.
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When the superintendent of my NMRA division suggested, at a gathering a few years ago, that I work to earn a Master Model Railroader (MMR) certificate, I recognized the gleam in his eye. Decades earlier, my scoutmaster had the same gleam when suggesting I go for the Eagle badge. It awakened some surprisingly complex feelings from deep inside myself.
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As is often the case with mysteries, I stumbled into this one quite by accident. A few years ago, Sam needed to thin out his rolling stock, and he sold me a pair of undecorated Atlas Trainmasters, and the decoders to go into them, at a very good price. I stuck them in a shoebox, unsure of what to do with them. They’re the Phase 1A variation with the big Mars light in the short hood, which doesn’t match the Trainmasters owned by the Lackawanna or the Pennsy. They are correct for the Wabash (outside my geographic territory), the Southern Pacific (even farther) or Fairbanks-Morse demonstrators (outside my era, even if decals were available, which they aren’t.) I finally pulled them out a few weeks ago, got the decoders in, and ran them for an hour at a library show. Nice engines.
By every measure, they’d be a good addition to my show roster, but they’re going to need paint first. So what to paint them? A freelance scheme of some kind, perhaps? How about a riff on the so-called “McGinnis” paint schemes of the New Haven and the Boston and Maine? That’d be cool.
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Our N scale club has a meetup every month in the local makerspace, and there’s a table just inside the entrance where people leave interesting junk to share. Mostly it’s an assortment of broken consumer electronics, old hand tools, outdated reference manuals, and other technological flotsam. Before one recent meeting, we were tipped off that a sizable pile of train-related things had been dropped off. We set upon it like hungry vultures, naturally, as soon as we arrived. It was the dregs of an HO-scale railroader’s hoard. No trains or track, but plenty of useful, or semi-useful items. Somebody came away with a tote full of scenery material. A few people divvied up the electronics parts and power supplies. There were even a few hand tools.
I got the tub of Kadee couplers.
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“Would you like to go to Chicago with me?” asked Peter one day in early April. The newly-merged CPKC had just announced their Final Spike steam tour, and Franklin Park, Illinois was the stop closest to us. My first impulse was to politely decline—I’d just taken several days off work to spend time with my son during the Total Eclipse, and a twelve-hour drive each way to and from Chicagoland didn’t sound particularly fun, steam or no. On further consideration, though, I changed my mind. Peter’s a transplanted Aussie, retired, and a big New York Central fan. The Final Spike Tour’s headliner, restored Canadian Pacific 2816, was the closest he was ever going to get in this day and age to his beloved NYC J3a. I suggested Amtrak instead of I-90 to him, and he immediately booked us seats on the Lake Shore Limited.
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A veritable tsunami has swept over my N scale club. Several of our newest members collect Japanese-prototype trains. It’s easy to see why: there’s a dazzling variety of sleek, colorful models available, many of them made by a manufacturer (Kato) we already know and love. The interest is now spreading to our older members, including me. In the wake of my discovery of Usui Pass, I found myself wanting models of the trains that once operated there. When Steve said, “I’m putting together a Plaza Japan order, you want anything?” I said yes.
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The internet has an amazing ability to find half-remembered things, like a science-fiction short story set in the Boston subway, for example, or a silly TV commercial for a short-lived breakfast cereal. This picture, however, was so vague in my memory that I didn’t even try to Google for it. I doubted that “something something steel mill something something modern Pennsy steam” would yield any worthwhile results. One recent day, I peered into the volunteer-run bookstore of a suburban library, and there it was, prominently placed on a book cart, facing the door, so that I couldn’t possibly miss it. I recognized it instantly, even though I had last seen it nearly 40 years ago on Mrs. Yahn’s art-class bookshelf. The cover price was $1. A handwritten sticker in the corner marked it for $5. It cost me a mere 50 cents.
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Furniture Railroads 