Early years
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, a few blocks from the Chicago-Northwestern line. My childhood was spent listening to the commuter trains and the occasional freight train. As kids, we would hang around the track, watching trains, smashing pennies and enjoying the smells of the railroad.
I cant’ remember when I got my first train set, but I do remember playing with my dad’s Lionel trains, and at some point in my early years, I got a HO Tyco train set.
In the mid 70’s, our family vacation was to Colorado, and I fell in love with narrow gauge trains and the Rocky Mountains. The first layout I built was on 4×8 sheet of plywood, a basic loop with a few sidings. Sadly I have no pictures other than dads trip photos.
My Dad worked at AMPEX, and when I was in high school, he started his own audio recording repair company. That gave me a steady supply of electronics, and my nature was always to take things apart to see how they worked. I was always tinkering with my trains and over engineering them with parts I could get from Dad.
I also had a love of everything NASA and science fiction. Over the year, I build alot of models other than trains. Still do.
My brother snuck me out of school one afternoon and we went and saw this unknown sci-fi movIe called “Star Wars”. My brother thought I’d like it. From that point, I was on a path to do something with computers and in the early 80’s, I built a 8 bit computer from plans out of Byte magazine. This movie also inspired me to build a robot.
I had a typical high school experience in the early 80’s and became very involved in high school theater. At this point trains were on a back burner, but I was learning all about the world of “presentation”. I went to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduated with a computer engineering degree, and started looking for a job. I tried my best to land a job in Colorado where I was inspired for narrow guage trains, but I wound up in the Bay Area California. But now that I was out of school, I started working on trains again.
The first few years was work, getting married, growing up :) and dabbling with trains in my spare time (Shelf layout, dabbled in N scale, HOn3). Then we started a family and trains were on back burner again. In 2002, I discovered LGB trains, and with my kids ,we built a garden layout. Growing up with the summer family vacations where we’d toss everything in the car and explore the US and Canada while camping, I did the same thing to my kids. :). One of the early trips was to Colorado that re-invigorated me on model trains and Colorado narrow gauge.
For years, I was ogling the Sn3 locomotives of the PBL ads is the Narrow Gauge & Short Line Gazette. I went to the 2006 Narrow Gauge Convention in Santa Clara and that was the end of all other scales for me. Large enough that it ran amazingly, small enough that I could find space for it in my house.
I have many hobbies in addition to trains. I have been an avid model builder since elementary school. I have enough kits for two life times of building. I generally build Sci-Fi, Real Space, or WWII Pacific Theater models. The world of 3d printing and CAD design is another area in which I tinker. Wood working and furniture building is another hobby of mine. Tinkering with electronics is another area, with lots of Aurdino projects, but my new go to is Raspberry pi. I think I have eight or so doing things around the house. Photography is another way I spend time, looking for that perfect shot.
Since I retired, I have also started making wine and I’m back in college getting a vintners degree.
But on a nice summer afternoon, you can find me on my patio enjoying the garden with our dog, reading a book.
