STAYING ON TRACK

The Newsletter of the Lubbock Model Railroad Association

APRIL 2003

CONVENTION TIME DRAWS NEAR

Time draws closer to the June 13 Lone Star Convention, right here in Lubbock. To participate in the convention you must not only be a member of the LSR, but you must register for the convention. Please fill out a convention registration form and mail it to me at the club's address (P.O. Box 53674, Lubbock, TX 79453). They are available at our web site. I will bring some copies with me to the meeting this Monday. You need to register to be able to go the meeting or to help run it.

SPECIAL OFFER

I recently received a special offer from Carsten's Publications. It regards a train ride through Canada called the American Orient Express (note this is an oxymoron). Their introduction reads as follows:

The 1940s and '50s represented an era of romance and glamour. It was a time when passengers boarded the great streamliner trains bound for points across North America. Today, after $15 million in renovations, these beautiful cars once again ride the rails, glistening with polished mahogany and brass and designed to reflect the style of the golden age of travel - when traveling was meant to be relaxed and savored - not rushed. The sixteen vintage carriages, painted in their signature blue and gold, carry approximately 100 passengers, who are attended to by a highly trained, professional staff and crew. Their sole purpose is not just to meet, but to surpass your expectations of the quality and service befitting the honored tradition of the great luxury Streamliners.

There is much more. There are dining cars, lounge cars, dome cars, sleeping cars and lectures "on board". The trip takes 10 days and nine nights and goes from Vancouver, British Columbia to Montreal, Quebec. Tour prices run from $3,790 to $6,790 per person if you register before April 18.

I will bring the brochure with me if you are interested. If too many people want to sign up, I will make some copies.

DUES WAS DUE

It is now past time to pay dues for 2003. The grace period ends at the end of March. Those who have not paid are dropped from the newsletter mailing list. Hopefully, this will be determined to be a bad thing.

APRIL CLINIC

We are trying something new this April for the clinic. We are going to do some basic repair work on the club pike layout sections. The intent is not to radically change anything, but to "spruce up" the ballast and scenery to get them looking as good as possible for the LSR convention. Randel will bring the four corner units to the April meeting. Our clinic that night will be to work on them. Garron has volunteered to bring a color-suitable ballast so that all the track work in all the units will look the same. Club members need to bring scenery items such as groundcover, trees, bushes, detail items, track spikes, track gauges, etc.

We will start with the corner units and then use the May and June clinics to finish the rest of the segments. With a little contribution from all the club members, we can get the club pike looking first rate without changing the original work or intent of the builder.

THANK YOU

Randel wants to be sure to say a "Thank You" to all the people who helped set up, run and take down the modules at Godeke Library in March. These setups are good for the club. They allow people to see good modeling and get introduced to the LMRA. They even get to take home a business card if they wish.

GUEST SPEAKER

Ron Kutch sent me this resume of Richard Troxell, our guest speaker for the LSR convention.

October 1986 to present: Goodnews Products, Inc., president, sub-chapter S Corporation. I write and do some publishing. I spend a lot of time speaking about trains and barbecue to civic and social organizations. I have authored: Barbecuing Around Texas and Texas Trains, Republic of Texas imprint, Wordware Publishing. Wordware recently sold its Republic of Texas imprint to Rowman & Littlefield Publishing of Maryland (I hope they do their publishing better than Marylanders do their barbecue).

I retired to Fredericksburg, Texas in 1995. Prior to that I owned an advertising agency in Houston, Texas.

Bee, my wife, says, "Richard never met a stranger."

I am in good health. Very active. Play tennis three times a week. President of Fredericksburg Tennis Association. Past Lt. Governor of Kiwanis Texas-Oklahoma District, Division 3. Organized four Kiwanis clubs; brought in 47 members in one year.

Graduated from SMU with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1950.

Richard

UPCOMING EVENTS

Train operations at the Arts Festival will be April 11, 12, and 13, 2003 at the civic center (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday).

The Carillon retirement home train operations are Tuesday, June 23 and Wednesday, June 25, 2003.

If anyone has any question call Randel at home (788-0701) or at work (771-5600). Or you can e-mail him at rbittick01@aol.com .

GRAYING AND PLAYING WITH TRAINS

By Terry Pristin as printed in The New York Times , Wednesday, January 15, 2003, pg. B1.

Go past the railroad crossing sign, descend a flight of stairs and there, in a grimy basement store crammed with as many as 100,000 items, Allan J. Spitz can usually be found behind the counter. Often his cat, Kirby, is draped over his shoulders as he briskly dispenses advice to a stream of customers, most of them middle-aged and male.

Mr. Spitz, 56, who conducts business in midwinter wearing torn Bermuda shorts and rubber sandals, is the owner of the Red Caboose, one of two shops specializing in model trains that face each other across 45 th Street between Fifth Avenue and the avenue of the Americas.

The Red Caboose and its neighbor, Manhattan Train and Hobby, are remnants of what was once a thriving little district catering to model train enthusiasts. At one time, there were five such stores on 45 th and 46 th Streets, including one run by a colorful entrepreneur known as Ma Webster that was in the space now occupied by the Red Caboose. In 1952, that store had 14 employees: Mr. Spitz makes do with two at most.

The two existing stores are struggling to survive, a reflection of the hobby's waning popularity - nationally, and not just in New York, where apartments seldom can accommodate the spaced devouring displays known as layouts. "I don't think there's enough business for two stores", Mr. Spitz said. "I don't know if there's enough business for one store."

In the pre-jet 1950's, it seemed as if every boy coveted a train set made by Lionel, once the world's leading toy manufacturer. But these days, model trains are an increasingly geriatric pursuit. Fifteen years ago, the average customer was 43. Today, he - and the customer is almost a "he" - is at least 50. The average age of members of the National Model Railroad Association, a promotional organization in Chattanooga, Tenn., is 55 said Gordon Best, the library director.

Today's customer is more likely to be someone like James R. Songer, a Manhattan architect, who returned to model trains after a lapse of many decades, a familiar pattern among older railroaders. At 63, he is trying to recreate the El Dorado, Kan., of his boyhood, when the Santa Fe and Missouri Pacific railroads came through town belching black smoke. Working in N-scale (one-160th the size of an actual train), Mr. Songer expects to spend $12,000 on his meticulous research project, which will include a doodlebug, the one-car train that shuttled between nearby town, and the luxury Chief, Super Chief and El Capitan trains.

Mr. Songer said he could still remember what the trains sounded like as they roared through town. "There's nothing that brings such intense pleasure than doing something that takes the skill and patience of a hobby and is connected to those childhood memories, he said.

Michael Dickey, 39, an investment banker who is originally from Pennsylvania, started with an N-scale layout of the Starrucca Viaduct in Susquehanna County, PA, and accumulated a dozen engines and 60 cars. He painted them to look weathered and painstakingly built scenery.

Now that he has a 3-year-old son, Mr. Dickey has taken up the more kid-friendly G-scale (the real thing is 22.5 times larger) and is storing his N-scale layout in his basement. "You've got to be constantly building," he said.

It's easy to imagine that there are many reasons that this kind of exacting work has less appeal to young people than it used to. Model trains are an expensive hobby requiring a combination of skills, from electrical wiring to carpentry to painting that children absorbed with computers may not have developed. Trains themselves no longer have a hold on the imagination of those accustomed to swiftly spanning huge distances by airplane.

Mr. Dickey, whose new train set occupies a third of his living room in Larchmont, N.Y. has another explanation: "It's a nerdy hobby," he said.

. . . To be continued next month .

Staying on Track is published monthly by the LMRA - David W. Lamberts, editor.

Visit us on the Internet at www.railserve.com/lmra

E-mail me at DWL1944@cs.com

Our mailing address is PO Box 53674, Lubbock, TX 79453

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