This past Tuesday, May 21, my Grandfather passed away at the age of 105. While he was never a railroader, he was a railroad customer. Long before my time he ran a chicken hatchery. He would occasionally buy a boxcar load of chicken feed. The feed came in burlap bags. He often talked about how once the boxcar was spotted on the siding, he would unload the car by himself. He would move the bags to his pickup truck and take them to the hatchery where he would unload and stack them. He repeated this process until the car was empty, usually within a couple of days after arrival. He eventually quit the hatchery business to farm full time. After his retirement from farming one of his "hobbies" was cutting firewood. He would hook an old manure spreader up to his Farmall and head for the woods and cut all day. I often joked that if his barn ever caught on fire it would burn for a month because of all of the firewood he had stacked inside.
When I built my train layout I constructed a vignette depicting Grandpa cutting firewood. I even included the Farmall and manure spreader. Every time I run my trains I will have fond memories of my Grandfather and all that he taught me.
Tom