As I was growing up nearly every boy I knew wanted to have a toy train. It was his dream to find a train under the tree on Christmas morning. I was no different. I looked at the Sears Roebuck catalog and drooled over the pictures of trains in the toy section.

We lived in sight of a real railroad where many trains passed every day. I wished that I could be the engineer and drive a train. If I had my own train I could make it go whenever I wanted it to go.

I got my wish one Christmas with a wind-up model. Our country home didn’t have electricity, so wind-up was the only way to go. It just went around in a circle until it needed to be wound again.

A few years later when we moved to town and had electricity, Santa brought me an electric model that looked just about like the wind-up train. A problem arose when I tried to run it. Santa didn’t provide a transformer. When I tried to run the train from the 120-volt house circuit the motor just smoked and burned. That ended my toy train experience for a while.

The idea of toy trains lay dormant in my mind for a long time; until I was in my forties. Soon after my own family moved into our Kenilworth Avenue house, I was browsing the magazine display while Mary finished her shopping when I noticed “Model Railroading” magazine and bought a copy. I was amazed at the things I saw in print. Aside from the expected advertising there was an abundance of articles about model trains and layouts. The detailed plans for building rolling stock impressed me most. 

I thought I’d like to try my hand at building a freight car. But I didn’t want to build one just to sit on a shelf and so I expanded my horizons. I visualized the finished room in the basement with a model railroad layout at one end. It would fit there very nicely

I found myself a few days later in a lumberyard buying some small planking and stuff for making roadbeds to lay track on. With the help of my magazine and subsequent issues I built the framework for my railroad layout. I found a source for HO gauge prefabricated sections of track and kits for cars and locomotives. I bought a few sections of track, a switchyard engine and a power supply. I was in business.

Little by little I expanded my track, adding switches, spurs etc. I assembled boxcar kits and soon had a working train. I had good intentions of making scenery, including buildings, roads and forests, but never got around to it. Instead, I pursued my first notion of making model cars from scratch.

I wasn’t satisfied with the starting and stopping motions of my trains. They started with a jerk and stopped similarly. The power supply was a simple transformer-rectifier with a means to vary the output voltage to control the train speed. The jerking problem was a result of overcoming friction of the engine when it was not moving. As suggested by experienced modelers, I built a power supply that provided voltage in short pulses. The engine can be moved very slowly, and the speed will increase when the pulses occur more often. The pulsed power made the train move a lot more realistically. 

Over time I added two steam locomotives, assembled more rolling stock kits and made a few cars from scratch. I much preferred steam engines to the plain looking diesel that has but little personality. My model-railroading hobby lasted until I moved in 1976. It was with some regret that I disassembled the layout and packed it all up for the move.

The next house didn’t have an inviting place to set up my layout so it remained in its boxes. When I found that I could make a decent tasting wine, I discovered a new hobby that had an entirely different set of amenities.