Some men will always be little boys at heart. Who didn’t love train sets growing up? The RV park has a working G gauge railroad in front of the clubhouse. Including the train, of course, all the streets and buildings light up. The guys in the club even where their engineer hats and post the times the train will be running. It was even all lit up and decorated for Xmas Eve. It is an ongoing work in progress and anyone can work on it. Really cute! Fun to watch it roll around the tracks. Some of the buildings and houses are as cute as can be. I love the hot dog stand. You can see the scale by comparing the layout to the people sitting in the chairs in the first picture below. So from very young to very elderly, the love of train sets is still alive here in Tucson.
We also love to ride on trains. In our travels we enjoy a day’s ride through scenic countryside. It is fun to ride in the outdoor open cars and take in the surrounding pretty sites of the rivers and mountains, etc. There is something mesmerizing about the sound of the whistle and the rumbling along the tracks under beautiful skies and open air. It seems to take you away to new places, leaving all your cares far behind. My camera is clicking away as fast as the train is moving!! Horseshoe Bend rail trip on the Thunder Mountain Line is about an hour north of Caldwell, ID, and was a great ride (picture #1) in August, 2008. We also enjoyed the Verde Canyon Railroad trip in Clarkdale, AZ, in April, 2012. One of these days we would LOVE to take one of those train vacation trips through the Canadian Rockies. Have to win the lottery first!!!
I , and a classmate, used to ride the train home from college in Marion, VA, in the far southwestern tip of the state to Virginia Beach, VA. We rode mostly at night and early morning. The train wound through the mountains before heading East. What pleasure to watch the sun come up in the early morning hours! I loved every minute of the rides. There are still adventures to tell at a later time.
I guess my love of trains started when I was real young. (That was a LONG……. time ago!) My brother always had a train set. Dad built him a nice large train board about waist high. I enjoyed playing with the trains as much as my brother did!. We kept the board in the den, then when we moved, Dad simply sawed the board in half and reattached it in the attic of our new house. When my brother moved out on his own, he still kept his trains. As he grew older he collected some of the really rare engines and I would go with him to lots of the local antique toy dealers. Alas, he finally put the trains up for auction, not having anywhere to run them again, and they sold for lots of $$$$$! He figured it was time for somebody else to collect and enjoy them. So I still love looking at the miniature trains and we have been to a few real train and toy train museums. You can tell how much I like trains because of the pictures I took and posted earlier!
Like Johnny Cash sang: “I hear the whistle blowin’, Comin’ round the bend…”
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