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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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 Mostly it’s an assortment of broken consumer electronics, old hand tools, outdated reference manuals, and other technological flotsam.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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I’ve devoted a considerable amount of ink to my recent HO purchases lately, but not so much with the N scale. It’s not that I’ve stopped buying N scale rolling stock—I haven’t. To me, the novelty of HO hasn’t worn off yet. Patience, please!
My N scale purchases have tapered off, but I’m still making strategic acquisitions in certain areas, such as mail and express trains. My interest in them probably stretches all the way back to Dad’s American Flyer 718 Mail Pick-up Car. Scooping up and launching little plastic mail bags under the Christmas tree with that thing was one of my favorite holiday pastimes.
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I didn’t need this caboose—in my growing collection of Tyco streamlined cabooses, I’ve already got one in the Bicentennial scheme. It was the box that caught my eye. Actually, it was the price tag on the box. Take a close look, it tells a story. Two Guys, a long-defunct discount department store, marked this car down to just 19 cents in 1977. (That’s still less than a dollar in today’s money. I paid $3.) As the kids say, a Bicentennial caboose was so last year by then.
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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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When word came round last August that the hobby shop had just gotten in a large N scale collection, I went to see it, thinking I could use another passenger locomotive, or perhaps some more Kato passenger cars. You know, something with lights, that would look good in a darkened driveway. What I found checked both boxes: a Kato RDC (Rail Diesel Car). The prototype was manufactured by Budd, the same company that made those lovely stainless-steel streamliners, and served as a one-car passenger train for railroads working to economize their passenger service. Never mind that none of the railroads I model had RDCs, this one was in Budd demonstrator livery, so it’s easy enough to rationalize its presence in my railroading activities.
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Furniture Railroads 