Moonshine

How old ARE you?!

cliffyk

Those are some of my very earliest memories from when I was 3 or 4 years old in 1949/50 -- In Plymouth MA the railroad station was right next to an A&P (The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company) grocery store, while my mother shopped my father and I would watch the trains. If I was lucky I got to ride in the cab while they turned the engine.

Great fun also was putting pennies on the track (they were solid copper then) and having the locomotive flatten them out.

I can't imagine anywhere nowadays that they would let a 3 year-old (accompanied by his father or not) get that close to a locomotive--but in those days people were a bit smarter, and those that were not got killed and thereby improved the quality of the gene pool...

Moonshine

That's actually pretty cool man. I can appreciate the 'simplicity' of life back in those days. I repaired railcars for a couple months. That's the extent of my personal locomotive experience hah.

I drove through the hills of CO on my way to NM and saw an early steam train in operation. It was apparently one of the VERY few tracks left in the united states.

For those of you who don't understand... Those old locomotives ran on more narrow tracks and smaller rails. It's a bit of a tourist attraction. It's part of some narrow rail museum of some sort. Hauls passengers through the beautiful mountains. Apparently it's been in operation for over 120 years.