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Your Own Childhood Indoctrination


Sean

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Just thought I'd do a splinter thread from the "Indoctrinating Children" thread to start one of your OWN indoctrination into model trains as a kid.  I was going through an album yesterday and came across these pictures which detail the progress of the N-gauge German layout (which began as a  simple starter track and freight train set I got for my 9th birthday) my dad and I put together when I was a kid (that is me in the pictures).

 

According to the photo backs, the first three photos were taken in:

November 1986

February 1987

March 1989

 

Shortly after the last one was taken my family moved from Germany to Canada and the layout spent most of the subsequent 20 years or so in and out of storage.  In 2010 or so my dad took it out again, by which time the scenery was in tatters, the ballast had fallen off the tracks and it was a pale shadow of its former self (though fortunately most of the buildings and trains survived OK).  He spent a few years trying to restore it to its 1980s glory, the last of the photos was taken in 2014 when he was still working on it. Unfortuantely in 2016 my parents moved into a condo which didn't have enough space to set it up, so it is back in storage. 

 

 

Got a lot of great memories of putting it together with him, going to the shops to buy buildings and trains, and that sort of stuff.  A lot of it was made up of Christmas and birthday presents over those years. 

 

 

Someday I'll probably bring it over to Japan and try to re-create it, though it will have to compete for space with my Japanese layout (which itself is in storage at the moment.....)

German Train 1.jpeg

German Train 2.jpeg

German Train 3.jpeg

Train - Mar 2014 007-1.JPG

Edited by Sean
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I never had trains as a kid. Planes, cars, boats and more planes but no trains. My son got me into trains. He's loved them since he was a tyke. I grew into them with him.

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My cousin got an Ibertren N scale starter set for Christmas in the early 80's. He had the 3-rail AC system unique to Ibertren. At the time that was a very regal present in Spain. He also had a RENFE timetable book and we played running the Barcelona-Vigo/Coruna night train, stopping and skipping stations, making announcements, splitting the train in Monforte de Lemos, inverting it in Venta de Banos and so on. Great fun!

Edited by Khaul
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Good question... I have a photo of my ca. 3 year old self grinning like a Chesire cat at a little OO gauge windup trainset, and my parents gave me a proper HO one the year after, though not sure why I liked trains so much, as I had very little exposure to the real thing until I was about 9 or 10.


The modelling interest died away when I a was about 13 or 14, coinicidentally rekindled a couple of years back when I was looking for computer parts in Akihabara, wandered into a model railway shop I happened to notice, discovered a driving car of one of the trains on my local line in the "junk" section, thought it would look nifty as a shelf decoration, the rest, as they say, is history...

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I started with hand-me-down Hornby-Dublo and a temporary layout on a sheet of hardboard on a table in the corner of a bedroom. Had items given me for presents as I grew up but lost interest during senior school and when I went to College had the usual other distractions (...cars, beer, girls,....) so ended up selling it all to raise cash (for new tyres as I remember).  Got back into it though when I bought my first house with my then girlfriend (now wife) and had just the right space to start again, this time with Graham Farish N gauge, as a relaxation after work and especially after I had been out on business abroad. My children though never got into, although my son did a lot of Warhammer modelling, but I may get the opportunity to indoctrinate the next generation as my 2 year old grandson is now starting to get into Thomas the Tank Engine...

 

Edited by yakumo381
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Well, I never had any indoctrination per se as a child. I spent Christmas 1979 (I was 3) in Hungary with my grandparents, my uncle put a Berliner TT-Bahnen train around the tree, which I apparently was completely fascinated with and I'd lay there on my stomach for ages just watching it run. My indoctrination was into music, which is still with me and always will be. When I was 4 my dad took me to the toy museum in Nuernberg, again there I was apparently mesmerised by the huge train layout there, and eventually I grew an interest in miniatures of anything... made dresses and furniture for dolls and built a few model airplanes and model cars. But I was also always enthralled by big machines of any sort - trains, or the mining equipment at the Britannia Mines near here, ships, the machinery in dams (The Dalles Dam, the Buntzen Lake Dam), electric substations, anything.

 

After I reached my mid teens that was all forgotten though for a good decade, through high school my attention was firmly on parties - and history. It was through my love of history that I started really developing an appreciation for railways and their role in the development of modern civilisation, from there I started developing an interest in the trains themselves, and then things went from there. I was 26 or 27, I happened to find a Shinkansen set for sale and I bought it on a whim just for display purposes. I sold it again a couple years later, but by then I'd started dabbling with actual modelling, of single pieces of rolling stock... and though at times I've toyed with the idea of a layout of some sort based on various locations that have interested me (e.g. the electric operations of the St Clair Tunnel between Sarnia, Ontario and Port Huron, Michigan, the BC Hydro Railway along the riverfront in New Westminster (my home town, I watched those trains a fair bit as a kid, along with the ships on the river), the Southern Pacific's Ventura Sub (I spent half year every year from 1984 to 1994 near Santa Barbara, my mum's house was fifty steps from the beach and ten steps from the Coast Line mainline, so if I wasn't on the beach, I was watching those big grey SDs pulling long strings of Golden Pig Service TOFC trains), South Manchuria Railway/Chosen Government Railway on the eastern border between Korea and Manchukuo, a freelanced North Korean branchline)... but it was only now with the Aizu Line that I've actually committed to doing something concrete.

 

So I suppose sometimes this affliction comes about spontaneously, without any real indoctrination!

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I grew up until I was about 10 on a ship in Oakland CA, but it was luckily docked (9 months of the year when we would live aboard) in the industrial area on the estuary that had a lot of freight traffic to businesses. I would spend many afternoons climbing all over freight cars parked on spurs near the dock and watch them getting switched in and out. Once and a while they would let me stand on a caboose platform if there was one on the formation and ride a few hundred yards up the line. If I was brave and went past my parental bike radius limit I would visit the big freight yards down at the port terminal that was always active! Summers in Pennsylvania I got to see gg1s running up the Susquehanna and a few passenger trips. So trains were very cool to me.

 

i had a few toy trains when younger, and a good friend of my parents in Pennsylvania (uncle ken and I was neff jeff) had a huge marklin layout that we would play with when we visited, so that was my introduction from very young to model trains.

 

when I was I think 9 or 10 another family friend in California that had some N scale and O scale tin trains (and shortly after some of the first z scale) picked up a few cigar boxes full of used n scale cars, engines and track at a garage sale cheap. It was early n scale stuff, but in good shape and I expect someone paid a lot for it and didn't get into it. He knew I loved his trains so he game me the boxes and that got me going! I built a small layout (started at 4'x2' and extensions to finally end up at 7'x3') that kept me playing with it until sometime in high school, when too many other things were competing for attention.

 

For quite a few years though my best friend who lived two houses over and I were all over n scale! We had a toy store about a mike's walk away wirh a full train department up in the loft of the store and a hobby shop about a 2 mile walk away. So we would do odd jobs to make some money (later a lot more by making wooden toys and metal sculptures) and as soon as we had a couple of bucks it was off to the train shop to spend a half an hour with nosed pressed to the glass case and fingers pushing the buttons to move the rotating shelves of cars to decide which was the next car to buy. To this day I really appreciate the patience the guys that worked at the stores to put up with us for hour and hours of decinging how to spend that $2! They probably kept th hobby going for us by letting us drool and be such pains for the meager funds we had. Xmas and birthdays were usually locos as we of course could not stand to save up to $20-30 for a loco!  It was also good as we learned early on how to totally strip down a loco, clean it and reassemble it to keep them going! Also forced us to make our own turntable and transfer table and some whacks at scratch building to save money. Dad having a full woodshop and me knowing basics of electronics young and being able to solder made things easier as well.

 

college came and layout needed to be replaced in my bedroom with a desk... never lost interest and even in grad school I had a loop of track and a few cars to get out and show folks. Found a tomix snow plow in our student union stor of all places and had that on my lab bench and folks always asking what the heck is that.

 

later was able to start getting back into the hobby in the early 90s and was interested most in big us freight, but a trip to Japan in grad school had indoctrinated me into shinkansens and the enormous variety of Japanese trains. Very early ebay purchase of an aurora 200 series got me thinking Japanese and quickly I dropped the us stuff totally after the second visit to Japan!

 

cheers

 

jeff

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