Chapter member Matt Gentry (who works for Athern) made the pages of Model Railroad Hobbyist. Read at
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/mrhpub.com/2018-09-sep/online/index.html
Category: Member Spotlight
I grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois which is a small Chicago suburb on the Milwaukee Road west line going toward Elgin, Illinois. We had a nice little wooden station that I could ride my bike to and hang out watching the trains. There were many trains to see from the benches since there were 4 main tracks. Freight and passenger trains were frequent. A few steam engines were still running and were unforgettable. I even rode my bike to the Bensenville yards to see the action and especially liked the diesel shops which were fascinating to a boy that loved all the complex machinery, tools, and engines that occasionally had hoods or doors off or open allowing a view of the innards.
For a couple of summers before I could drive, my friend Jack and I took the train to Itasca, Illinois to caddy at a golf course. The train fair was 31 cents each way and we might earn, i f we were lucky enough to get a golf round, $3 for a single bag and $6 for two bags for 18 holes. And if we got two rounds in a day we felt like Rockefeller. This was for carrying the bags on our backs, no carts. This was pretty good money for the day even after figuring in the train fare. Of course it was always a thrill to ride in an old heavyweight passenger car. The 3 or 4 spittoons in the men’s smoking room were just an added attraction, I sometimes wonder were all the country’s spittoons went to. Gosh, they were truly disgusting. The acceleration of the Milwaukee’s EMD F units were exciting as were the rumble and guttural sounds emanating from the huge and beautiful diesels.
I was also lucky enough to occasionally see and feel the New York Central EMD E units in Lasalle Street Station in downtown Chicago when my aunt from Vermont would come to visit. These trains were true classics compared to the old Milwaukee trains that I rode to various jobs. Several times I was able to walk through the NYC cars before my aunt would leave for home and I could experience the elegance, comfort, and style of a world class train before I had to get off and re-enter the real world of a train shed that seemed a mile long and hear the wonderful sounds of many prime movers in the E7 or 8s. Each engine having at least 2000 or more Horsepower compared to my Dad’s Plymouth of about a hundred.
In high school I worked a few summers loading 40 and 50 foot boxcars on the Milwaukee Road with televisions, stereo consoles, and radios for Zenith Radio and Television. If you have never loaded a boxcar, you can never imagine just how incredibly huge they are. I mean HUGE.
So these are a few remembrances of my early connections to trains and the mighty railroads that did so much to build this great country.
Rich Hane
Birth of a Rail Fan
If there was one thing in this world that my uncle, Roy, loved more than anything else, it was the passing of the Illinois Central freight trains and coal trains in front of the house where he lived with my grandmother and my aunt. No matter what he was doing, when he heard a train approaching, he would run to the front of the house, take out the handkerchief that he always carried in his hip pocket, and wave it back and forth over his head as the engine passed and again when the caboose came by. (In those days every train had a caboose.) The engineers would always reward Roy’s waves with waves of their own and with some nice long blasts of the train whistle, which would cause him to squeal with laughter.
When trains passed after dark but before everyone had gone to bed, Roy would turn the front porch light on and off repeatedly, and the engineer would always sound the train whistle.
Roy was my mother’s brother, and he had Down’s syndrome. He could not live independently, so he lived with my grandmother and my divorced aunt in a little country house on a one acre lot in rural western Kentucky. There was a set of IC RR tracks that passed within one hundred feet of the front of the house, so close that passing trains would shake the old house and rattle the windows.
Roy had the mind of a ten year old child, and he had a child-like innocence about him. He loved everyone and was quick to forgive whenever someone teased him; Roy never held a grudge against anyone in his life. If all of us could love and forgive others the way Roy did, the world would sure be a better place.
Roy was the “man of the house,” and he chopped kindling, brought in coal from the coal shed, and started a fire in the cooking stove every morning. There was no running water in the old house, and one of Roy’s chores was to draw water from the well just outside the back door. He also kept the yard mowed and the weeds cut during the summers. Roy took great pride in performing all of his chores, and my grandmother and aunt depended on him.
I spent entire summers at my grandmother’s house in 1957, 1958, and 1959, when I was eight, nine, and ten years old, and I shared Roy’s love for those trains, especially when the steam locomotives, which were in the process of being phased out, were still in use.
One day a minor miracle occurred. The train, which had been going back and forth doing some switching of coal cars at the tipple about an eighth of a mile down the tracks, stopped dead still in front of my grandmother’s house, and the engineer climbed down from the cab of the locomotive, motioning for Roy to come to him. He then handed Roy a railroad lantern! Needless to say, that lantern was Roy’s prize possession for the rest of his life.
Roy died at age 51 in January of 1976, and the railroad men sent flowers to the funeral home for him. I know that they must have missed his enthusiastic greetings as they passed that house.
Sadly, the old house has been torn down, and even the railroad tracks have been taken up. That little one acre paradise of my childhood summers is gone forever, but it lives on in my memories and always will.