Trains

Monday, October 29, 2012

Trains

     Everyone sooner or later has been near a train, on a train, read about a train, or had something delivered by train. Warren Buffett bought the Burlington Northern Railroad and railroads deliver new cars to your city. I remember the last of the large-sized coal steam engines near my old house in Outremont (a suburb) of Montreal (Quebec, Canada). As kids, we'd place those real  100% copper pennies on the track, and when the train rode over, we'd have a flat piece of copper the size of a silver dollar.  How many western movies did you see with a train in it? How about Burt Lancaster in the film "The Train", where he saved stolen art form the Germans in that WWII movie?

    Once again, I'm using the fine images from Icollector, and from Dan Morphy Auctions. Dan Morphy's photos on collector are superb, and provide enough pixels for me to resize them for nice viewing.

www.morphyauctions.com/

(please press on the above address to be redirected to The Morphy site)

     I like Dan Morphy's logo - "Specializing in Fresh to the Market Collections". I wonder if he uses the railroad? So, for today, I'm presenting  trains, and especially Lionel Trains. I don;t know much about trains, but I do know there were plenty of companies, both in Europe and in the USA that made toy trains. As a young child, I had a Lionel train set. I'd play with it in the living room, biut because we lived in a smaller triplex,and we were 7 (my parents, my grandmother, and 4 children), I had to dismantle the train after playing with it with my younger brother. The set that I did have was a Lionel and it was solid! The tracks fit perfectly, the trains stayed on the tracks, and the transformer worked well. 

     CP (Canadian Pacific) has a rail line near me, and the ATM Montreal Commuter system passes by my house during rush hours. CP and CN (Canadian National) were the 2 railroad systems that opened up Canada to the West. Cp was always private, while CN used to be, but the government sold it off years ago. It's been a highly-successful company, and has expanded strongly into the USA.

I purposely lightened up the original box that this caboose came in.
In later years, the box design was changed, and the immediately-recognizable orange box with black lettering became an iconic logo!

     A few years ago, I went to Toronto (Ontario, Canada)  to see an antique toy show. There were 2 large rooms in the exhibition halls of near the airport. One was full of old toys, and the other one was dedicated to trains. Those poor guys, has spend almost 10 hours setting up their fabulous exhibitions, which would last for 3-5 days, and then had to be taken down again. The room was unbelievable. Full of trains of all kinds and sizes, with of course the realistic settings of towns, animals, hills and valleys. THere was every resource there also for the train fan, ranging from all kinds of parts, to paints, repair people and so forth. It was great to see that train collecting was still popular!

   I will make room in the future for 1 or more posts on trains. You just can't write 1 post on trains and leave it there. Trains opened up this continent, and all the others, and they deserve the space and time in more articles.

Thanks for visiting,

and if this is your first visit, I'm always willing to have anyone help me out by sending photos and a story.

As usual have a good, morning, afternoon, or evening wherever you may be.

And if you're in the U.S.A. please take care -

Hurricane Sandy is coming ashore!

Stacey