The Most Remarkable Car in the Train

“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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Programming a Long Address into a Kato FL12 Decoder
The end car of a Kato 485 series EMU, with headlights and head mark lit.

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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This Picture Has Haunted My Dreams

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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Ice Fairy at the Throttle
A rendering of JR EF63 electric locomotives pushing a train on Usui Pass.

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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Mail Enhancement Products
An assortment of N scale mail and express cars.

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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My Real Hobby is Overthinking the Geometry of Sectional Track | Driveway ’22 Part 1

Truth be told, sectional track is the main reason I stayed awake in high-school math class. Once I realized that mathematics could answer important questions like “how close to the edge of the plywood will this loop be?” and “how long do I need to cut that fitter section?” it became much more relevant to me. To this day, I carry a calculator with trigonometry functions everywhere I go, just in case a track-planning emergency crops up. Thanks to my enhanced geometry skills, my first book—about track planning, naturally—was well along by graduation time. (I self-published it a year later.) When the time came over the winter of ’21-22 to design a replacement for the Covid-19 Emergency Railroad, I was rarin’ to go.

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Seasonal Merchandise

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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Hunka Hunka

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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