Model Citizens Page #4

or nine years old,

it was just fascinating.

- I got into railroading,

I think,

because of my brother.

My brother always loved trains.

He was in the Navy.

And this is in the late 50s.

He came home on a 30-day leave.

And he brought home a number

of HO gauge brass locomotives

that the Japanese had

begun manufacturing.

The Navy would

shell Korea.

(intense music)

- [Voiceover] Spring is

a bloody time in Korea.

- And the battleships

and the large cruisers

would come back to port.

And they literally would shove

the brass gun shell casings

over the side in the harbor.

And the Japanese sent

out their pearl divers.

And they dove down and retrieved

the brass gun shell casings

and took them back and

melted the brass down

and made them into

things that they

could sell back to the sailors.

Brass models of ships,

and brass models of trains.

So my brother came

home with a whole bunch

of these beautiful brass models.

Which, at the time,

were the latest and best

that was available in

HO scale railroading.

And we decided to

build a layout.

- I have been a model railroader

since I was a small child.

Starting with a wind-up train,

and then a first

simple electric train,

which I still have,

at home, and it's

still operable.

And then I went to

finer and finer scales,

finer level of details

in my trains.

And now I am what I'd call

a scale-model railroader.

I come by this honestly,

my grandfather was,

worked for 56 years for

the Santa Fe Railway.

And his father before him

and even I worked

for the railroad

in the 1960s, out of Chicago,

working my way through college.

So I did a little

railroading myself.

And it's just always

been a part of my life,

and my family's life, as I say,

for a couple of generations.

So I guess there

was no way for me

to really escape from trains.

Had I live, grown

up, somewhere else

other than Chicago,

the railroad capital

of the nation.

Let's say had I grown up

in Boston, or Nantucket,

I'd probably be modelling ships.

But I model trains.

I picked 1954.

The railroads were

all at their heights.

There were many

different railroads.

There's something

going by right now,

in the background.

And that is music to my ears.

- You've gotta have

that drive in you,

that bug that keeps

saying, "A train!

"I hear a whistle, I

hear one, where is it?

"I gotta go see it."

- The Strasburg's coming in.

(train bell tolling)

The locomotive will cut off

and move ahead to a switch

and then back down the track

and couple up on the

other end of the train

for the trip to Paradise.

It's a four and a half mile run,

it's called the

Railroad to Paradise,

or you can call it the...

(train whistle blowing)

You can call it the P and

B for Paradise and Back.

- [Voiceover] It

goes to Paradise?

- There's a little

town in Pennsylvania

called Paradise, Pennsylvania

and that's where it goes.

Paradise, Pennsylvania

is usually joined with

two other towns, or

sometimes three other towns,

to make a sexual joke.

There's a town

called Virginville,

there's a town called Blue Ball

and there's a town

called Intercourse.

So if you do from

Virginville to Blue Ball

to Intercourse to Paradise,

it makes a certain

kind of warped sense.

- Well it's hard

not to be interested

when a steam engine goes by.

I mean those things are alive.

They pant and they

moan and they whistle

and they chug and they

chuff and they creak.

And you just can't ignore a

steam engine when it goes by.

And I think

Americans in general,

because we're a

product of history,

we weren't born here,

except for Native Americans,

we all showed up from somewhere.

And so we have a sense

of where we were before

and we have a destiny.

And that's Europe,

that's Africa,

that's China and that's Japan,

and that's everywhere.

That's the beauty of America.

(train whistle blowing)

(awe-inspiring music)

- [Voiceover] For most people,

trains tap into something deep.

- I think if you scratch a

lot of model railroaders,

what you will find,

right under the surface,

is, in many cases, we're

trying to re-create

a special time and

place in our own lives.

- I was born and raised

in the Kensington

section of north Philadelphia.

And I was within walking

distance, north of me,

of the main line

of the Pennsylvania

Railroad, which ran,

the passengers ran from

Washington DC to New York

and all the western

freight trains.

And if I would go the other

direction from my home,

I was close, within

walking distance,

of the Reading Railroad,

which was a big coal hauler.

They brought the anthracite

coal from the coal fields

in Pennsylvania down

to the Delaware River,

where they were

loaded onto steamers

and plied up and down

the eastern seaboard,

the Gulf Coast and

even South America.

- I grew up in

northern New Jersey,

in a town called Phillipsburg.

Phillipsburg was a

big railroad town.

In its heyday, I

think there was like,

five or six railroads

that all converged

into that town.

It's actually right

across the river,

the Delaware River,

from Pennsylvania.

So we're really

close to the border.

Bethlehem Steel was close by.

And Phillipsburg was a big

industrial town as well, so,

hence the railroads.

- Well Sacramento, of

course, is the launchpad

for the Transcontinental

Railroad

from the West to the East.

But even before that,

before the Central Pacific

Railroad got started here,

pretty much right

where we're standing,

the Sacramento Valley Railroad

got its start here as well.

Just a few years before the

Central Pacific started.

- Railroading is what

linked the country,

the golden spike at

Promontory Summit.

That magic hasn't gone away,

it is still pretty cool to see

a mile-long train zipping

along at 60 miles an hour.

Less cool at 10 miles

an hour over the road

that you're trying

to get across,

but, it's pretty neat.

- Now, when I grew up,

back in the late 50s

and the early 60s,

we didn't have the

security we have today.

So I used to get on my bicycle

and I would ride down

to the local yard,

which was probably about

10 miles from my house,

and you could just

walk into the yard.

Watch the engineers

switch the cars.

Go to the engine terminal,

watch them on the turntable.

Always fascinated with this.

- I actually grew

up along the lines,

a main line for Conrail.

That was the first step that

brought me into the Conrail.

But it wasn't until much later,

like around the

mid-90s, early 2000s,

that it really took off.

In fact, there's

actually a funny story.

When I was younger,

my parents were

restaurant owners,

but two blocks behind

the restaurants,

is the main line, is

the same main line,

from where my parent's,

you could see from my

parents' apartment.

So I was about,

maybe five or six.

I kinda snuck out and the

weather was nice, it was warm,

because I kinda snuck out and

went down a couple blocks,

just plopped myself

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