Arnold D. Cribari posted:Many of us have experienced the euphoria of getting later in life what was unaffordable for our parents and us when we were kids.
You're calling my name, Arnold.
I got my first Lionel when I was three, at Christmas, 1951. It was a Korean War 2026, with two 027 Sunoco tank cars, a black NYC gondola and a generic SP caboose with only one coupler and no window "glass." My father was an undergrad at that time, and I still can't figure out how he was able to afford that train. It was a demonstrator set that ran on the dealer's Lionel layout, so that must have helped. Many years later, he told me he paid twelve dollars for it, and as tight as cash was for us in those days, he must have paid it off a little at a time.
He graduated in 1952, and very soon thereafter, we moved to a Pennsylvania small town. Dad built a fairly large Christmas train platform, and I loved it. I spent hours running the 2026 and its freight cars. But we still didn't have a lot of disposable income, so no extra equipment was added to the roster for a long while. All the same, that platform went up every Christmas
Meantime, Dad would always bring home Lionel catalogs in the fall (I never did know where he got them), and I would pore over them like a Talmudic scholar, gazing at all the colorful illustrations of Lionel's glory years. The 681; the 736; the 2046...and most of all, the big GG1. It was the stuff of which dreams are made, and I dreamed plenty of them.
When I started doing well enough in my IT career, I decided it was time to make those childhood dreams come true, no matter how belatedly. And eventually I managed to find near-mint examples of all those high-end Lionel locomotives. I even got myself a beautiful GG1. I seem to be the only one around here who was never attracted to the Santa Fe F3s, but when MPC Lionel appeared in the Seventies, I bought one of their ABA Canadian Pacific sets. Still looking for a good postwar chassis to put under that shell.
They're all around me on shelves, now, right off the pages of those long-ago catalogs. In fact, my 2046 is on my layout right now. The original 2026 is upstairs on our coffee table, along with the three 027 Lionel Lines passenger cars that I wanted but couldn't afford in the Fifties.
My only regret is that Dad isn't around to see them run; he passed away ten years ago. And I never run any of the postwar trains without remembering him and Christmas, 1951.
