One Sleepless Night

I always wanted my own train layout! Christmas, every year, would always see a small train set around the Christmas tree, but in the blink of an eye….. the train is in its box under the bed, the tree is in its box under the stairs, and I am back to school and work. My parents, who provided very well for me as a child, did not have a lot of extra pocket money. However, every once in a great while we would make the pilgrimage from southern New Jersey to Delaware (where my mother worked) to go the Mitchell’s. A wonderful hobby shop. A haven with crafts and models of all kinds. A great staff and--- almost as great (greater, if you ask my wife, a native Delawarean)----no sales tax! But alas, we still had no space or funds for a layout. Then came military school, university, and ROTC. Years went by....

Then the Corona Virus came…. Fast forwarding in the story, I am now 30 years old. My love of history had continued from childhood and now I had become a teacher. Yes, teaching History and Science. I had joined the Northern Delaware Model Railroad Club. Now the club was closed. All my students missed seeing their friends and were becoming bored with being stuck inside. OR... That is what they wanted you to think. I would see children outside playing without masks together from our apartment, or by my parents/grandparents house all day. My own students told me most of them played together every day (unmasked) at the park and were: "living their best life during Covid." Luckily, there was so much work for me running the everyday online class, grading, tons (50 on a slow day) of emails, et cetera. But not leaving the house for months was too much. And then the perfect storm happened.

At the club, I had become friends with Mr. O’Shaughnessy, who has a tremendous Wild West train layout. I had pored over the website, which became my how-to regarding early 1900 model railroading, “John Ott’s Old-Time Railroad Models & HO Scale Projects” by Mr. John Ott and his very storied Miskatonic Railroad. I met on Ebay Mr. Maxwell Brisben, who had built the beautiful and extremely photogenic Thatcher Brook Railroad. I was inspired by Mr. Bernard Kempinski and his United States Military Railroad layout and blog. I also found on Youtube the amazing creation of Mr. Bill Henderson in his Coal Belt Railroad. All this, and my accumulated boredom culminated into one frantically sleepless night, madly creating the legend…. the mockumentary… the fake history of a fake railroad.

My wonderful wife said, on our first anniversary, “Let’s start getting together what we would need for our train layout.” We talked about the future layout and how it would have to be small, no bigger, probably, than 5 feet by 10 feet. We could not build it in the apartment we are renting; however, we could begin to collect the engines, cars and other things needed. It would have to be small, but I have learned that small does not mean undetailed from my friends. It would have to be photogenic, and my wife said “if it’s 1910, the room has to look 1910.” This layout will be a mix of part model, part historical museum, part science museum, and part unknown.

The following website will be a chronicle of the eccentricities, adventures, and hopefully few misfortunes of building “the most historically researched railroad that never was.”