Christmas Memories

Ron Williams sent a photo titled "Ghost of Railroads Past" that shows a modern BNSF diesel with a larger SLSF unit in the background similar to a watermark. This made me think back to my Christmas memories of the Frisco.

I grew up in Springfield, Mo and didn't know of any railroads except the Frisco. We always lived close to the railroad as I grew up and I vividly remember watching trains switching at the corner of West Ave and Division St. or underfoot on the Commercial St. footbridge.

I started modeling the Frisco while attending college after discovering custom painted Frisco models at a hobby store at Sunshine and Glenstone. This opened a whole new world for me. I didn't have a lot of disposable income those days but I was able to work on a fuel tank car, a GP7 and an SD45. I also didn't have a lot time being in school and working at Meek Lumber Co. on east Sunshine. But Christmas time was different.

The lumber yard shut down between Christmas and New Years and the school semester was over and that gave me a whole week to visit the Frisco, shoot some photos and start a modeling project. I remember getting in the old Skylark armed with my brother's Polaroid Handle (remember those?) heading over to the yards and trying to stay warm. I still have a lot of those old Polaroids but boy are they bad by today's standards. I have photos of the yellow box cars, a black GP7 (#516 I think during Christmas 1978) on an east end switch job at Broadway St. and several shots of engines at the Diesel Shop. Christmas time was a great time to photograph railroad equipment with snow on the ground. The whole city seemed to slow down a bit giving me time to sit in my car and watch it all roll by me.

With those instant shots I was able to go home and paint one of those famous Athearn undecs and wait for the paint to dry so I could letter it. Seemed like forever and I am sure I jumped the gun on lettering some of them. If I didn't have the supplies I needed, I would recalculate my budget to see if I could squeeze in a new bottle of Floquil and some Herald King decals (probably a whopping $5 for both). Those were the days when it was magic outside watching the real Frisco and magic inside as I (crudely) transformed an undecorated car into a piece of Frisco equipment. My can of propellant and I were best buds at that time.

I always associate Christmas with trains for these reasons and this year will be no different. Now, instead of painting and decalling, I am installing DCC decoders and building a layout I could only dream of in my college and younger years. Little did I know that my start in the hobby back in the late 1970s would provide a lifetime of enjoyment and countless modelers that I am glad to call my friends.

Maybe you have some fond memories of Christmas, the Frisco and model trains that you might like to share.

I hope you have a very Merry Christmas and get something railroady under the tree.

 

Interesting story Rick.
Let's see, so far during this year's Christmas season I've went to Rick's layout (always a LOT of fun) and worked on some stuff at my layout. Replacing coupler springs (finally tried that and got a few couplers fixed, but I lots a lot of springs ) made a gravel load for my hopper to put on my MOW train. And I have already built the grain bin (thank you for that Rick.) That one took a while, but it was fun. It will look great next to my elevator. Now I need to get a Sunrise feed mill to complete the grain area. Maybe it will be under the tree Now I need to resolve some decoder issue. Attached are some pictures of the grain bin.

 

For Christmas in 1954 (I think--it could have been 1955) I got a Lionel "Texas Special" F3A-B and some passenger cars that ran around our tree (what else). The cars are gone but I still have the F3s, they still look pretty good and they still work, including the sorry-sounding horn. These days, however, they sit on a shelf, which is, I guess, the O-gauge equivalent of being retired to a city park.

GS

 

The Frisco always had a good party for its Kansas City employees. It was held in the basement of the Rosedale Office building, and the highlight of the party was the arrival of St Nick, himself. During his trip to Rosedale, Santa eschewed sleigh travel, in lieu of one of the wide-vision cabooses. He would ride atop the caboose, which was delivered to office by one of the yard engines. He would clamber down from his perch to join the party, and distribute gifts to those assembled.
On many occasions Santa was played by Frisco employee, Ralph Twigg, who was well suited for the role. Ralph was a Santa Fe modeler, and he came by the house on several occasions to run on our basement layout. He had a pair of Hobbytown ALCO Santa Fe road switchers that were beauties.

Merry Christmas to All!

 

Another of my Christmas memories although this one is a bit more recent. Looks like one of Santa elves got loose and is dispatching my railroad.

 

I remember Kieth wearing that hat my first trip up there. That was a couple years ago. Notice the firefly heavy weights in the back ground? You haven't had your 1950 stuff on the layout since 09'

Ethan

 

Some of my favorite memories of growing up in Wesco were going with my Dad in the winter time and cutting a rank of dead elm and building a fire in the iron stove inside the "Old Store Building", which was the Asher Bros. building that my parents owned and still own. That's where I had my layout when I was a kid. It would take an hour or so for the building to warm up, but I sure had a lot of fun when it did. I had two engines, both Athearns. One was a BN GP38-2 and the other was a Santa Fe SD40-2 in the SP merger scheme. We could only pick up one radio station inside the building-KZNN in Rolla, "100,000 Watts of Pure Country Power!"

On the outside, we had those big colored Christmas light bulbs that no one uses anymore. Inside the house, Dad's 10 point buck would get decorated with garland and tinsel. I've heard my wife express her intent to do the same thing to the eight pointer I got earlier this year once I get it back from the taxidermist. I can see an argument brewing already.

BTW, Ken, how could anyone compare the StL. Cardinals to the StL. Browns??!!, LOL. That's like comparing the early Mets teams to the Yankees!

Pat Moreland,
Union Mo.

 

The hobby of model railroading started a bit differently for me than the traditional Lionel train circling the base of the Christmas tree. The room that I shared with my brother was in the attic and when I was about ten I explored the storage area behind the knee wall was that was behind our closet. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the remnants of a Lionel O27 layout stored in one of the boxes. Once I tried to put it all together, I was disappointed that there was no locomotive, but the rest of the pieces were there: a steam tender, freight cars, caboose, track and a transformer. Later I asked my dad what happened to it, and he said that it was broken though he didn’t explain further. As I pushed the cars along the track, pretending that the tender was some odd kind of diesel, I became fixated on what I wanted for Christmas that year; a new locomotive that would make the train set fully functional!​

I pestered my parents like crazy about the locomotive, though I realized that such an expensive gift might be out of reach for a single income family with five children. In the frenzied activity of that Christmas morning, I soon discovered that I would not be getting an O scale locomotive, but a gift that initiated a lifelong hobby: A Lionel HO Texas Special freight train set. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it turned out to actually be better. Why had my parents chosen this way of satisfying my desire for a model train? Probably because they wanted to start me with something completely new rather than tie me to a train set that was, by that time, over a decade old. But perhaps another factor was that my dad was an executive with the Frisco and saw this particular train set as a tie in with his job.

For those of us old enough to remember, this period was at the height of the Cold War. Lionel, who was trying to reclaim some of the toy market from a boy’s natural predisposition towards jets and rockets at the time, released some odd freight cars. Some examples were the satellite launching car and the exploding boxcar. My train sets nod to this marketing ploy was the radioactive waste car which lit up when power was applied. I can imagine that the reaction to such a toy these days would be something like “Not in my back yard!” Unfortunately, every time the car was on the track it sapped power from the locomotive so the train would hardly move and would stall on any kind of a grade.

Over the next couple of years my interest in model trains provided ample gift list ideas for birthdays and Christmas. A simple no-fuss gift would be to go to a toy store and buy a freight car or building kit for me. For one birthday I lobbied hard for two Texas Special passenger cars. I wanted to emulate the train that I saw when we dropped my dad off at the Webster Groves station to go to Tulsa or Fort Smith on a business trip. This time I got exactly what I wanted.

My layout consisted of 4’ by 6’ sheet of plywood held up on 2 ends by lawn chairs. It was too short to accommodate the trestle set that I received along with the train set so I settled for the standard oval with a switch. The plywood was thin and sagged in the middle but the concept of a frame and legs was never brought up. My parents may have considered this a passing phase, but another factor was that my younger brother, sensing favoritism towards me, clamored for a train set of his own, which he eventually got.

Some of the items I received back then still survive though the collectable value is gone as I used the rolling stock as the basis for later painting and decaling experiments. Once I had a burning desire to have a Frisco box car, but as far as I knew, none were commercially available. I noticed that boxes of matches that my dad always had an ample supply of, pictured a Frisco box car that was about HO scale. I put my claim in for the next empty box. When I got it I cut out the herald, reporting marks and the “Ship it on the Frisco!” slogan and white glued it to the sides of my DSS&A boxcar. The result was to crude even for my low standards of the time and I eventually removed the makeshift panels, only to discover that I had destroyed the surface underneath.

Over the years I’ve collected hundreds of Frisco related items, far beyond anything that I would have imagined that first Christmas. But I still have yet to build my ultimate Frisco themed layout though I’m getting closer to it all the time.

Happy Holidays to all who frequent this board!

Rich

 

Drifting off topic, I know, but Ken that's very neat about your family being acquainted with the Brown's announcer. It's a shame they had to move to Baltimore and become the Orioles.

Since there are no rival teams in St. Louis now, my family finds other subjects to argue about.....Ford vs. Chevy is one of them. I've had the same Mustang GT since I was 20, so you can guess whose side I'm on.

Back on topic: We started a tradition in our home a few years ago of cutting a real tree for Christmas and setting up a circle of Bachmann EZ track around it. An 0-6-0 saddle tank named Thomas had duties for the first four years, but since my son has outgrown him, we now use a Rock Island 2-6-0 and caboose, plus a Frisco 36 ft. hopper and a MKT covered hopper.

Pat Moreland,
Union Mo.

 

For me it all started with an ad on the back of a DC comic book for an Aurora Postage Stamp N scale train set in 1970. The more I looked at that ad the more I wanted a postage stamp train layout. So, I pestered my dad into taking me to the local hobby shop to look at trains. After looking at the displays and talking to the owner, I told my dad that is what I wanted for Christmas. Well, on Christmas day I received a Santa Fe Postage Stamp train set and enough spending money to pick out a power pack, track, roadbed, buildings, and scenery items. My Dad and I built the train table and I laid the track, incorrectly as I didn't yet know how to lay roadbed, but hey I was only 14! Here is a photo of the layout that started me on a life long hobby. Every time I see it I think of the good times I spent building it with my father.

 

George,

The photo is great! Wish I had taken some of my first layout. It wasn't very good by any standard but I still had a lot of fun.

Who knows what memories we are making now that we will look back on with great fondness?

 

If that isn't a Frisco Christmas Card picture, then I don't know what is. Even Santa needs some downtime with his trains. Looks like he's getting some good dispatching time in... Awesome! LOL...