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I gazed out to the sight of billowing smoke, a loud blast of a whistle and the din of the massive steam engine pulling a half dozen passenger cars. This was my introductory to trains. To be precise, the Lackawanna railroad that ran through Paterson, N.J... I lived with my grandparents at 607 Main Street in the early fifties. The living room window faced Garret Mountain, it was only a county park but which could have been the Rocky mountain range for me. In later years it would become my back yard!

Crossing Main Street then one block more was Marshal Street, then a cobbled stone road that led up to the receiving area of an old brewery to the West and a two block long coal distributor to the East. This later burned down in June of 1965 on a Friday evening while watching the Twilight Zone on TV, at 10PM. The fire raged for five days till it was completely out!

The thrill of seeing over two dozen coal cars being shuffled in and out of that covered building was exciting, but when the engineer invited me up into the cab of the SW1200 switcher, it took my breath away and left me forever in awe of trains.

I began my hobby in plastic models. Ships, planes, cars and of course military vehicles. But my mind craved for more than just static models! Sure some of them had moving parts like retractable landing gear or motorized ships, still there was something missing. Then the display in the window of Glendale pet & Hobby Store downtown finally got my attention. It was a HO scale train running around a loop that got it. I must have watched it for hours when Frank the owner came by and offered me some French fries. He inquired as to my interest and I simply pointed to the display and he smiled. He knew I was hooked.

My allowance consisted as to how much I did around the house each day. A quarter here, half dollar there plus 2 cents on pop bottle returns in a few weeks I had over ten dollars. And it was down to the hobby shop I ran. My first purchase was a hustler engine and enough track to make a circle with 22 inch radius track. Over the following months with granddads help it grew to a nice collection of freight cars and finally got a transformer to run the engine. That December I turned nine years old and Christmas brought even greater joy to me for it added to my collection of cars, Smallville snap together structures and a few switches. Later years I would acquire a building product called Homosolte to lay my trains on.

Over the years lessons where learned in math, geography,

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