My Electric Train

I wanted an electric train a long time before I got one. Once Dad took me to a friend’s house. I don’t remember his name. The man lived in a nice house in Schaffer Addition. The houses there were new and expensive. This man’s house had a finished basement. I had never been in a house like that before. In his basement he had huge pencil collection. It covered one whole wall of one of the rooms. There were hundreds of them attached to a pegboard on the wall. He also had a large button collection. It was all very impressive! But the most impressive thing was in another room of the basement. It was an electric train.

The train was on a table high platform that took up the whole room. There was a two-foot walkway all the way around the outside. There were a couple places where you could duck under and come up in an open spot in the middle. The platform had the train track, switch yard, a miniature village on opposite ends of the room and, in between, mountains, tunnels and realistic county side. The detail was amazing! It looked just like real life shrunk down to fit on that platform.

The man ducked under the platform and came up at a control panel. There he could start and stop three different trains. He could control switches and send trains down different track. He could even control lighting in the houses and buildings in the villages. I was hooked. It was amazing!

One Christmas, not too long after that visit, I got an electric train. It was fabulous! It was an HO scale train. For awhile I would set it up on the dining room floor and run the track under the table and back out in a big circle. That wasn’t good enough, though, because I had seen nirvana in that basement.

Dad cut large sheet of plywood to a four foot by seven-foot piece. He placed it, using the posts on each end over the spare bed in my bedroom. The board was about eight inches above the mattress. It was perfect! I could set up my train and leave it up for long periods of time. The board could easily be removed if we had company and needed the bed.

I painted the board with the help of my mother, laid out the track and slowly started adding houses and buildings. For a long time I had a Styrofoam mountain with a tunnel through it. I didn’t like it much because it was flimsy and I didn’t think it looked real. The Explorer Scouts had a big electric train set up at the fair grounds and after visiting it and seeing what they had done I decided I would build my own mountain.

I shaped the mountain using chicken wire. Once I had the mountain and the tunnel the way I wanted it, I soaked strips of newspaper in a plaster paste. I laid the strips over the chicken wire until it was completely covered. When it dried it looked like a big white mountain. I painted the mountain brown and the peak white like it was covered with snow. I thought all mountains were that color. Several visitors commented that the mountain should be green but I didn’t care. My Dad didn’t either. He loved it and was amazed at my construction.
(Somewhere there is a picture of the train on the bed but I haven’t located it. If anyone has it please send me a copy.)

Over time I added cars, track, and another engine. I was very proud of the layout. I played with it and rearranged it often. I took the engines apart completely many times and put them back together. In the process I learned about what made them work. I learned that you had to use a transformer to change the electricity from alternating to direct current and that the circuit had to be complete before it would work.

Every kid ought to have an electric train!