My dad built a 4 x 40-feet AF layout in the basement of our home in Peoria, IL. It was the full length of the basement with a large perimeter loop and an elevated second level with a reversing loop at its south end. It had a few switches and some yard tracks. It was larger than the showroom layout at the downtown HOBBY MODELS store. My next-door neighbor friend Tommy had Lionel trains, and we rotated from house to house to play with the trains.
I regularly received AF trains as birthday and Christmas presents for several years in the late 1940s and early 50s: a steam Atlantic with red NH passenger cars, a steam Berkshire with various freight cars including a die-cast depressed center flatcar with a cable reel load, and a Santa Fe warbonnet passenger set - the pride of my fleet.
I was then the go-to neighborhood kid for lawn-mowing, leaf-raking, and snow shoveling chores. I applied my earnings to my first self-bought purchase of a DC controlled AF Pennsy O-8-O steam switcher with its own neat-o rectifier. So I could run two trains simultaneously and independently; one controlled by the AF transformer throttle, the other by the rectifier.
As a teenager, I attended a private boarding school in a Chicago suburb and was separated from my trains. In 1955 my dad called me at school and said the father of a neighborhood kid inquired if the trains might be for sale for enjoyment by his son who would be bed-bound for a year while recovering from a heart condition. I accepted $330 for all the stuff valued at about $1600 in mid-50s dollars. But the memories of that layout never died.
Decades later as a 50-ish adult, I re-entered the hobby with Lionel trains and set a goal of acquiring O-gauge trains made by all manufacturers of the Rock Island RR, the railroad that served Peoria at that time. My RI collection, accessories, and related gear grew to an inventory eight pages long. After a stroke in 2014, I decided to exit the hobby and sold the collection via Stout Auctions. Everything was sold in a weekend. However, I kept two Lionel train sets as mementos.
Mike
mottlerm@gmail.com
