I was born and grew up very close to an active railroad track. The railroad operated by Southern Pacific and later Willamette and Pacific ran right along the bottom of our farm. When I was very little before we moved to our farm on the side of Rex Hill and instead lived on top of Rex Hill, my dad would hear the train coming and drive me down to the crossing on Quarry Road to watch the train go by. In grade school I even got to ride on the train between McMinnville and Newberg for my birthday in the locomotive cab with the engineer.
On family vacations we would occasionally go ride a heritage steam train. When we went to Colorado, we rode on the Georgetown Loop Railroad and the Cumbres and Toltec Railroad. We also visited the Colorado State Railroad Museum. All those great narrow gauge steam trains were wonderful to see. I saw plenty of standard gauge trains one year at the California State Railway Museum and rode several times on Portland’s 4449 Daylight locomotive. Before the old roundhouse in Portland was demolished, I even got the opportunity to go inside and visit the 4449, the SP&S 700, and if I remember correctly, one of Sumpter Valley Railroad’s narrow gauge engines was undergoing restoration in the roundhouse at that time, too.
It was pretty obvious that I liked trains from how excited I was every time the freight train rolled by the farm when I was a little kid. This led me to being introduced to model trains by my parents and grandfather. We had my dad’s old Lionel trains from when he was young and later got some HO trains which turned into a nascent layout in the basement. We built the benchwork, installed the track, did the electrical, and ran trains. The scenery was just barely started on before I got busy with school. We still ran trains on it from time to time but as I went to college, the layout was disassembled and the trains were stored. A Lego train made an appearance at some point, too.
Through college, my mom got some N scale trains to run on a tabletop board and my grandpa gave us a G scale train for the Christmas tree. I watched the freight trains rumble through Corvallis from time to time. I also noticed the old steam engines on display in towns such as Corvallis, Toledo (Oregon), Cathlamet, Vernonia, and elsewhere. I even joked that I was in school to be an engineer but I went for the wrong type of engineering — not the kind that allows you to drive trains.
As I moved into grad school, I started pulling out the boxes and boxes of trains we had stored in the basement to put around the Christmas tree. Every year the display got a little bit bigger and a little bit more of a trip hazard. My family’s house on the farm outside Newberg had a huge living room which allowed me to sprawl my trains out all over the place.
After grad school, Heather and I started making regular trips out to see heritage steam railroads. We rode the Sumpter Valley Railroad in Oregon. We rode the Cumbres and Toltec, the Royal Gorge Route Railroad, the Georgetown Loop Railroad, the Cripple Creek and Victor Railroad, the Leadville Colorado and Southern Railroad, and watched the Pikes Peak Cog Railroad go by in Colorado. We drove on and explored many abandoned railroad routes throughout Colorado on many of our 4×4 trips.
When I came home for Christmas, the train layouts around the tree would get more elaborate every year. They reached their peak in 2017 at the farm in Newberg before my parents decided to sell and move to the mountains in California. In the future I expect the Christmas layouts will return and be bigger and better than ever.
Lately I have been reading up on model railroading through several free online magazines. I’ve also discovered the Nn3 model railroading community (narrow gauge model trains in N scale running on Z scale tracks) which I am considering joining as a modeler. My space is limited for running trains at home and likely will be for many years to come so I have to think small and get creative.
When I was a kid watching the freight train slowly rumble by on Rex Hill and playing with trains in the basement, I never thought that I would be so captivated by trains throughout my life. Now I try to regularly get a dose of railroads wherever I go. Hopefully soon I’ll have a micro layout in my house to play with again, too. And yes, the massive Christmas train extravaganza will return again.
All you need to do is search my website for the word “train” and you will see just how much I like trains!