One of my first memories as a child was of the second floor Victorian apartment in the suburbs west of London. It was across an arterial street from a surface station on the Piccadilly and District lines of the London Underground system. The trains passed under the street and emerged alongside the apartment and we could see and hear them through our family room and bedroom windows. Double-decker electric trolley buses ran along the street, until they were eventually superseded by their diesel counterparts. London, like many cities, including Seattle, dismantled electric tram, streetcar and trolley systems, only to now replace them at enormous cost.
It was the early Fifties, war rationing was still in place and London was slowly rebuilding from the bombing. The country was struggling with IMF loans, currency was restricted for travel and incomes generally were slow to recover. As any visitor to London knows, its parks are a treasure and we made good use of them. Vacations would come much later. It was a surprise then, on Christmas Day in 1953 to receive a large box containing an electric train set. But wait, the rails are missing! At which point my father, ever the master cabinet-builder, produced a large sheet of plywood to which he had attached the oval track. And so I learned the thrill of watching the train go round and round in one direction. When I got bored with that, I would empty a tin of glass marbles into the oval. The track formed a half-inch smooth wall and by grabbing the edges of the plywood, I could swirl the marbles around as they bumped and jumped around each other. Nascar fans would understand.
Later, a school friend would interest me in train spotting. No, not the Danny Boyle movie! The UK railroad companies had been taken over by the government at the start of WWII, prior to being formally nationalized in 1947. The system retained it’s original regional organization in the form of six, then five divisions. Pocket handbooks listing all the classes of locomotive and their respective nameplates and numbers were published for each division and armed with these we found a vantage spot and waited. This was still before diesel or electric locomotives were introduced for mainline passenger or freight duty. As we observed a specific locomotive, we would neatly underline the number listed in our book and we pored over each others books for bragging rights. We kept it up for a few years, before other interests and boring diesel locomotives took over. Our favorite spot had been next to a freight marshalling yard, which came back into my life years later as it was also the location of my then girlfriend’s apartment. Visits were notable for the loud banging which extended late into the night as the freight cars ran into each other.
When I was ten and attending a boys only Catholic school, a senior teacher (and closet human being) led a trip from London, by train and ferry boat, to the shrine of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees. A highlight was the first real croissant in Paris as we crossed between rail stations, followed by the interminable grind south overnight, eight to a compartment, with frequent stops while a track worker swung a hammer at each wheel to check for cracks. After arrival, the mood picked up as we made the first excursion, while sharing a bus with a group of girls our age and their accompanying nuns. Being that age, we sang songs with toilet jokes, to the great amusement of the girls if not their chaperones. Our teacher leader, now out of the closet, just laughed. The return train journey went by much faster as we snuck into the girls compartments and dodged the nuns.
Our family finally acquired a car when I was seventeen and eligible for a learner’s permit, evidenced by the mandated six inch red “L” attached front and back on the car. What UK train journeys we had taken by then were hardly memorable and are now forgotten. If we wanted to visit the far corners of the country, we drove there.
After getting married, my wife and I relocated to a country village eighty miles north-east of London where we could afford a new house. So started the daily commute by train back to our jobs in London. Catching the train involved a mad dash through the country lanes and a sprint from the station parking lot over a footbridge and, breathless, onto the train as it was about to leave. Adhering to the conventional wisdom that the only decent jobs were based in the city, we kept this schedule until the second national rail strike finally did us in. Two years after joining a manufacturing company in the nearby small town, I found myself transferred to Los Angeles as general manager of the US division. So much for perception.
When I returned to London on the occasion of my father’s passing in 1982 and was travelling back from a visit to my sister’s house in Wales, I took a train from Cardiff to London. I looked up from a book wondering if the train was ever going to leave the station only to find the scenery flying by. I had not even realized and I was back in London in two and a half hours. I have taken just one train ride since, in 2015, from Everett to Vancouver BC on Amtrak to board a cruise ship. It took over four hours for a distance 25% shorter.
When a trip with our elementary school age children to the Seattle Science Center coincided with the annual model train exhibition, the worm began to wriggle. First came the subscription to Model Railroader, then the book of layout plans, and finally construction. My eldest son was told to hold stuff while I did the fun part and the 4 x 8 foot standard club module took shape. It bent and swooped in a double figure of eight that would involve thirteen track switches and a ninety-degree cross-over. Boxes of parts were acquired, many from the electrical controls business that I now owned. Family members got on the bandwagon and train stuff became birthday and Christmas presents.
But alas, reality reared it’s ugly head. There was no time or space to accommodate the grand vision. The wooden frame work was turned on it’s side and banished to a corner of the garage where it remained for the next thirty three years, neglected and gathering dust.
But here in Ovation, trains are never far from mind and so it is with the model railroad, enjoying its new found liberation and notoriety. Track is being laid once more, with the pending challenge of wiring the rail circuits through all those switches and reversed directions without shorting it all out. Don’t fear for your electric supply. It will be fused.
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