Hello!
I'm the new guy. I have been a lurker on the forum for several years. I always bought my O Gauge RR magazines at the hobby shop and kept it at that. I run trains! Don't care too much about the era, I mix and match everything, if it has wheels under it and the couplers match up it goes down the tracks. Our family calls our railroad the All Rails West Division of the Anderson Railway (ARW2) for short! It's nice because I can say all rails West of where? Anywhere! I grew up on HO. Always wanted the big stuff, but the family couldn't afford it. While in college I really wanted some family friendly trains. Like a lot of others about highschool age I put my trains away. When my parents got ready to move, they said I had to collect everything or it would go to the thrift store, so I went back and picked up my boxes and boxes full of HO stuff. I moved away for college and joined the UTTCA in Ogden, UT. Over the years I have been part of several clubs, I was a part owner in a hobby shop in Nampa, ID, and started a hobby club for soldiers while overseas (great way to keep those young guys out of trouble!)
Back to college, I was hired by a locksmith that owned a literal house full of O gauge trains. He kept trains in the shop and this relit in me a desire to get big trains. Trains my kids could drop and I wouldn't feel like I needed to bark at them. HO with all of it's intricate little parts and details just wasn't for small children from what I saw. He introduced me to the UT TCA where I learned about large scale modular layouts. I began buying my first O Gauge trains at this point and attended my first train shows. The Army took me lots of places after this, and the trains mainly went back into boxes. I slowly traded off and gave away almost all of my HO and slowly began to pick up more scale O. I was an early adopter of Protosound 2 and Lionel's TMCC. It was at this point that I became fully cemented into 3 rail and big trains. I had built several layouts by this point in time, and worked on several club layouts in different states/countries. The Army in it's benevolent but unforeseen kindness re-assigned me to my alma mater. Now serving as cadre for Weber State Universities Army ROTC program I invited one of my former classmates to bring his wife and kids over. Running the trains his daughter throttled up my Railking Challenger (Proto 2 but operating in conventional with a ZW). It raced around my layout, went into a curve, jumped off the table, and crashed onto the floor below. I picked it up, checked and saw there was no damages, put it back on the track and she continued to run it! No damage to electronics, or paint, nothin! I was sold on big metal trains made by MTH! I still have that challenger after 20+ years. It still runs, all I have ever done is swap out the battery for a BCR and change the traction tires.
Up to today. This past summer our family had a disaster. We had just come home from a family trip to Train Mountain in Oregon. We were only home for a week when a wildfire ripped through the western side of our county. Just short of 500 structures were lost, several farms, and businesses. We lost our farm, house, barn, farming equipment- you get the picture. The day after while there were still fires raging all around I talked the firefighters into letting me back in with the hope we could check on our livestock. I figured my house was gone because I had stayed and fought the fire until it was only about 100' from our house. As my son and I pulled up to the property I was amazed and gratefull to see two buildings still standing- our shop- which had a room for all of my Ham radio gear, and the old horse tach shed. When me bought the ranch the agreement with my wife was I could have the 40x 40 horse tach shed to run trains. It took a lot of work to clean that old building up, it wasn't fully enclosed and was in a bit of disrepair. So over six years I made it functional and the ARW2 was born residing in a 13 x 40' section of the shed. The trains had survived! I had installed solar power off grid as a back up source for the Ham radios and as a bonus ran 20 amp service over to the train shed- it runs the lights and trains. So while we had about 40 fires still burning on our place, my son and I sat in awe that we had been blessed to keep our trains! Due to the summer heat I had left a window open and a fan on to keep things cool, who wants all of those rubber traction tires to dry out in the heat?- not me. When we walked in the fan was still running, which had kept the smoke up in the air. I left it running and amazingly the train room two weeks later didn't smell like smoke-unlike the rest of the property. All we had to do is slowly clean up the dust and soot. 7 months later and I am still dusting trains off.
I currently work teaching soldiers Network defense certifications. This morning I was auditing another teachers class on Linux Networking and security and checked the news. Wow! Right at the top was the story about the bridge being taken out in the Baltimore Harbor and how this will shut down the harbor. As I looked at the pictures of the containership plowed into the bridge and the aftermath it dawned on me- wouldn't it just be our luck that after all of these months of waiting for the new MTH DCS WiFi units, and Lionel Base 3's to show up, that the containers full of our pre ordered electronic toys were probably on that ship?......
While we are rebuilding may God Bless you all that you have some time to play!
-Patrick, KF7OOT, shakykiller, steamdriver, Silver Lake 5, Dad of 5 amazing kids!
