02-Trains-Traditions

Family Traditions

The earliest memory I can recall from my childhood, centers around a Christmas holiday when I was somewhere between the ages of 1 & 2. I cannot remember the exact date, but I do recollect still having problems climbing stairs at this particular time in my history. Since I was born on August 5^th 1962 - I would have been only 4 months old at my first Christmas, 16 months the next, and so on and so forth. I figure I should have been walking by my second Christmas. Though I might still have been in the learning process of stair climbing.

The reason I was climbing this flight of stairs was because of my father’s HO scale train layout under our Christmas tree. His train didn’t have a caboose and I simply wouldn’t go to bed until it had one. The extra cars in his train collection were stored under my parent's bed.

This layout also had an HO scale race car set within the oval of train track. I believe it was a Tyco and remember the controllers had little steering wheels that you turned to make the cars race around their slotted track. As you turned the steering wheel, a gauge similar to a speedometer, showed how fast you were going. Two other buttons included a brake and a switch to reverse the direction of travel. As this is a story about trains, and I was never a big race car fan even though we did play with several different race sets in my youth, I will get back to more of my first precious memory.

(Note: My mind sometimes wonders off the main subject at hand. Not far, but it does wonder. So you should be prepared to read just about anything - related or not. )

Both my grandfather and great grandfather (on my father’s side of the family) worked for railroads. My gram said she doesn’t remember what her dad’s job was exactly, but they did get lots of free passes to ride the rails. Her family did quite a bit of traveling that way when she was younger. They would take a trolley car from town here in Selinsgrove PA, across the river to our next closest "city" of Sunbury, and would then board a train for an all day shopping excursion to still other nearby "cities" of Lewisburg, Bloomsburg, and even our state capital of Harrisburg. She remembers these train trips taking several hours both ways. The funny thing is today you can drive the same routes in a short period of time. (Except Harrisburg at about an hours ETA.) Or at least you used to when I was younger. The way things are "progressing" around here - with all the malls and new traffic lights - I bet some day in the near future, history will indeed repeat itself and that same shopping trip will once again make for a very long day. My pappy Wagner worked building freight cars when my father was younger. And my father, himself, also helped build refrigerators cars for the Penn Central RR after he got out of the armed service.

(NOTE: Oddly enough, our computer repairman who fixed our mainframes during my senior year at New Berlin’s Vo-Tech school (and later when I got my first full-time job with Snyder County Trust Company) also worked building refrigerator cars for the same railroad my father worked for. Small world isn’t?)

When my parents first got married they lived with my dad’s parents for a year or two until we could find a place of our own. Which for the next 34 years turned out being the other half of the double-house my little family had started out in.

Now at this same time in our past my mom’s married youngest sister, Ruthie, lived over in that "big" city of Sunbury, and we went to visit her and my uncle Eddie quite often. They also lived in half of a double house with my uncle’s brother living next door. Uncle Ed’s father also worked for a railroad and passed on the trains under-the-tree as a Christmas tradition to his children. (There sure were a lot of trains around before I was born. ) The reason I’m bringing all this up is because every time we went to visit my aunt and uncle, we usually got stopped at a railroad crossing to wait for a passing train. Sometimes we’d miss the engine, but we always waved to the man in the caboose and he always waved back. Today kids have all kinds of TV shows and computer games to teach them to count and learn them their colors. But I learned both of these from counting and observing passing train cars. I could count to 100 before I even started kindergarten. I’m guessing the year would have been somewhere around 1964 - 1965. By this time I’d seen hundreds (OK, more like lots and lots) of real trains and they all had a caboose with a nice man waving. So our Holiday Express train needed a caboose as well, it was as simple as that.

Dad tried using the reasoning that we were playing with a passenger train, and not a freight train like the ones we saw passing through town. Here’s a really cool part to this story. Right around this same time the TV shows Wild Wild West and Petticoat Junction were weekly series. Shows which we watched regularly.

(NOTE:)
PETTICOAT JUNCTION - set in Hooterville. . . . Air Date: 1963: 24 September
WILD WILD WEST -The Night of the Inferno - Air Date: September 17, 1965
GREEN ACRES - Goodbye City Life - Air Date: 9/15/65
THE ADDAMS FAMILY - Air Dates: 18 September 1964 - 2 September 1966

My dad’s first train set was an Old Time Wild West set with a steam engine, a baggage car, and two coaches. He also purchased an Athearn AT&SF diesel engine and an assortment of other freight car Athearn & Roundhouse kits that he had assembled. I always love the way little kids minds work and you can probably see where mine is headed. The train I was running around under our Christmas tree that year was very much like the ones I saw on TV. And since I had seen all those cabooses and waved to all those brakeman, my small child mind simply put two and two together and said "hey, our train needs a caboose too." This is why I remember I was still learning to climb stairs. I was suppose to go to bed but I wasn’t going too until our train had that caboose. Dad had one under his bed, and no, I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. A deal was struck, as soon as our train got it’s caboose I would go to bed like a good little boy. I started crawling up the steps (probably because I was too tired to "walk" up) so dad picked me up and carried me the rest of the way. Once the caboose was located, dad carried me back downstairs to the layout as I held onto that bright red Santa Fe caboose. The train got its caboose. I ran it around the tree a couple times, and then off to bed I went. The caboose was, like I said, bright red. ("Hey, that rhymed!") For some strange reason red is still my favorite color today. And then Black. I wonder, black steam locomotive at the front of a train, and a red caboose last. Hum?

And that’s the earliest memory I can recall from my childhood. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I’ve read about cowboys and cowgirls who say they were riding horses before they learned to walk. For me, I was playing with trains while still learning to climb my first flight of stairs. Recent studies into the field of hypnosis and retrieval regression (remembering things from way back when) prove that adults can actually remember their own births. Even going as far as reliving the experience of passing through a dark tunnel and aspiring into the light. Some can describe what the doctors and delivery room looked like. Who knows, perhaps under hypnosis I might remember things that happened even before this particular Christmas. But to be perfectly honest, I’m pretty happy with this mental movie I have now, thanks.

Since several generations of fathers in my family worked for different railroads, it was a natural destination for them to give their boys train sets for Christmas. And Christmas layouts have been a tradition in our family ever since. In the past 36 years I can only think of perhaps one or two Christmases when we didn’t have a train under our tree. And even then, someone else in our family had one set up that I would get to play with.

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a train chasing it’s caboose around a beautifully decorated tree.

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