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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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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“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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It began, as most trips down YouTube rabbit holes do, with a tantalizing thumbnail in my feed. Some of my non-train-related leisure time these days is spent watching anime with my neighbor Steve, so a video with both a train and a blue-haired anime girl was all the clickbait I needed. YouTube knows what I like. I clicked through, and was treated to an engaging low-poly 3D animation of electrified helper-grade operation through Japan’s Usui Pass. This was unlike any Japanese railroading I had ever heard of. When I hear “Japan,” “mountains,” and “trains,” I think of Mount Fuji as a distant backdrop to a speeding Shinkansen, and…well, that’s about it. But a 6.67% grade? That can’t be right, can it?
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Collecting Tyco streamlined cabooses has become a hobby-within-a-hobby for me. As caboose models go, the Tyco is an odd duck—it sorta-kinda looks like an Ann Arbor caboose, or maybe a Pennsy N8 with an off-center cupola, but not really. They were ubiquitous in ’70s-era HO scale railroading; every kid I knew with HO had one. These days, they’re easily found at train shows for $5 or less, in a broad variety of paint schemes, even a chrome-plated version, so why not?
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Today marks the 75th anniversary of the final run of the Pittsburg, Shawmut & Northern Railroad. An obscure railroad even in its heyday, the Shawmut hauled bituminous coal out of northern Pennsylvania, and served no major cities. Its major claim to fame was operating in bankruptcy for longer than any other American railroad—over 40 years. After they finally pulled the plug in 1947, this lantern found its way onto a mantelpiece in my hometown. My parents bought a house across the street in 1969, and Dad first saw the lantern soon thereafter. Decades later, the neighbor’s children gave it to him after their father passed away. I once asked a memorabilia vendor at the Syracuse show for a ballpark value on a Shawmut lantern with a marked globe. He gave me a number. I mentioned it later to Mom.
She’s afraid to dust it now.
For the record, the caboose in the photo is not the American Flyer 806 I received as part of my first train set, fifty years ago today. I still have that one, but after a series of accidents, crude repairs, and ill-considered modifications, it’s not something I care to show to people. I picked up this one at a show some years ago, and it’s identical to what the original one looked like back then.
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Furniture Railroads 