Author's Biography

The Model Railroad - Related Biography of the author- George Gaige

Like most of us, my love of model trains was inspired by my father who introduced my brother and I to HO scale railroading when we were pre-teens. My brother was six and I was ten. He came home one day around 1956 with a brand new diesel engine, some cars and track from Trainland in Lynbrook, New York. Apparently he had traded in an American Flyer S Scale set (which I don’t ever remember seeing set up) for this much more reasonably sized and new (to him) HO Scale equipment. For some reason, we never had a train set under the tree at Christmas time. We were excited to run this equipment and helped him build several 4X8 layouts on a table in the basement on the weekends. My father Commuted to NYC on the Long Island Railroad five and sometimes six days a week, usually getting home too late for week night work, but he often made a lunch time trip to one hobby shop or another to bring home a new piece of rolling stock, or a Plasticville structure to add to the layout.

Our layouts were straight out of the Booklet “101 HO scale layouts” by Atlas? and all the track was Atlas, with Mantua, Athern and Tyco rolling stock. Allowance money was often spent on after Christmas clearance sales at Modell’s Department Store. A single piece of plywood was cut with a hand saw into cookie cutter road bed shapes and screwed to risers to elevate the roadbed as needed. Window screen covered with paper mache or plaster was used to create mountains and track embankments. We never got as far as creating power districts or block sections, we only ran one train at a time. After a few months, we would get tired of the layout and build another. Eventually, teen age struck and we lost interest and sold the equipment to a younger friend.

I picked up the hobby again in the 1970‘s when I got married and we purchased our first home on Long Island, NY, with a completely unfinished basement. At that time I found a great little model railroad club in the area. I think it was called The Smithtown Society of Model Railroad Engineers. They had a layout they were building in the basement of a church. At the club, I learned about building your own track, turnouts and crossings. I built my first adult 4 x 8 layout in my basement with another 4 x 6 section completely comprised of hand layed track and a manual turntable with scratch built turntable bridge. I have a few photos but, that layout was packed up for a move to another home around 1980 with no room for a layout. The salvageable parts were put in storage in the garage. Unfortunately, a house fire took most of what remained of that layout along with a lot of other personal possessions in 1989.

The next few years I was very busy with raising family and work and did no Model Railroading until 2000 when we moved to a larger house . My wife was well aware of my love of trains and Model Railroading. I must have mentioned that we never had trains around the tree at Christmas growing up, and she surprised me with a beautiful Christmas tree set in 2000. I was so impressed with the detail and performance of this set that I investigated building another model railroad in our new home which had another beautiful unfinished basement. Repeating my father‘s footsteps from the 1950s, I headed back to Trainland. I was amazed at the progress in Modeling technology and bought a few pieces of equipment. I found out there was a great model railroad club not too far away where I could learn about the new newest innovations in the hobby. This was the West Island Model Railroad Club in Central Nassau County. There I learned about the wonderful world of DCC, sound systems, power districts, modern layout construction, scenery and animation effects. By this time, I had semi retired from a career in public health to work part time for the American lung Association. This gave me plenty of time to devote to my rekindled love of model railroading. The members of the West Island Club were very supportive and knowledgeable and I am very grateful for what I learned from them. They were happy to have me because I loved to work on the railroad. Not every member was a worker, some were just lurkers, or came to run their own equipment if they had no home layouts. But that was fine as the club needed a large membership paying their monthly dues so they could make their rent. The club was in the basement of a small shopping center with bars, restaurants and a pet store upstairs. This often lead to leaks from the ceiling onto the layout, escaped mice and hamsters running on the layout and other cohabitation conflicts. The club eventually moved to a much better space where they now reside.

With what I learned at the Long Island Club, I was able to build my second adult layout, which lived for 6 years. This included DCC and sound technology and was about 12 X 20 feet in size. I also began to experiment with animation effects, such as operating water tanks, coal and gravel loaders and working vehicle headlights.

When my wife and I finally had enough of the stress of commuting to work in New York, we took advantage of the booming housing market and sold our home on Long Island in 2006, moving to Central Virginia. We found a beautiful new house with an even larger unfinished basement. We moved from a County with a population of 1 million in New York to a county with a population of 24,000 in Virginia. There was only one traffic light in the entire county! I didn’t expect to meet many other modelers in such a rural area but I was soon invited to an operating session a few miles away and discovered 10 to 12 other men with operating layouts who invited modelers to run on their railroads. This was a great bunch of gentleman who had formally had a club in the area but lost the space in a nearby church when the church needed the room for its own expansion. Before the pandemic, members of our group were holding sessions 10-12 times a month all over central Virginia, occasionally traveling a little farther into northern Virginia to operate on some pretty impressive layouts. Most of us are retired, so many sessions are on weekdays. It is not unusual to travel 90-100 miles for a session, although most are closer. Carpooling helps for the farther-flung sessions and gives us extra time for socializing.

With encouragement and support and a newfound interest in “operating” sessions, I started construction of the present layout a few months after moving here in 2006. Construction went along pretty quickly and I was able to have small sessions by the end of 2007 and formal operating sessions by about 2010. The layout now occupies the entire basement, 1200 square feet, and can accomodate 10-12 operators. We run time table and modified train order operations and employ a car card system for rolling stock control. Every session begins with lunch on the house.

Several of the gentleman in our traveling operating group also have extensive and excellent model railroads, mostly in HO scale. Three of the members of our group are Master Model Railroaders and after a few years they encouraged me to try to qualify for the certificates needed to become a Master Model Railroader also. Principle among these are Rod Vance, Bob Minnis and Mat Thompson. Other NMRA members who have encouraged me are Gerard Firzgerald, Mike Montgomery, Don Wells and Bill Wurtzell. My AP coordinator and chief mentor is Rod Vance who pointed out that I had already done a lot of the work required to apply for the certificates and I only lacked the documentation to complete requirements for some of them. Nevertheless, I did need to develop some new skills for some of the AP Certificates and found the learning experience very enjoyable.

The first certificate earned was Electrical, in August, 2019. A relatively easy task, since it mostly involves documenting things I had already done, The Civil Certificate followed in November 2019, which was more work because I had to hand build three pieces of track work and get them inspected. By that time I had already documented the requirements for Chief Dispatcher, so that come in November 2019, also. I had already built the layout, so it was easy enough to add the Scenery certificate in the winter of 2020, when we could still have visitors to do the evaluation.

We went into isolation mode when the pandemic struck in March 2020. This forced (or allowed) me to concentrate on the structures, cars and author Certificates. I already had built many structures for the layout by this time, and 10 of the 12 required structures had already been evaluated before we went into isolation. I had built and super-detailed many car kits, but I had no scratch built cars whatsoever. I needed to scratch build 4 cars and two more structures and I needed to have a way for the NMRA evaluators to judge them. My AP Coordinator suggested bringing them up to my garage and spreading them out on tables so the evaluators could maintain social distancing, wear masks and gloves and confer on the porch to judge my work. All the work scored high enough to qualify and my Cars and Structures Certificates were awarded in the fall of 2020.

This gave me 6 certificates. Although I had volunteered to serve on the Local NMRA Committee, we were not having any meetings, so no points were accruing. I checked into the Author Certificate and found I already had earned some points by submitting a few things for publication in the last few years. I wrote four more articles for our Local newsletter ,”CROSSTIES" and the Division Newsletter, “THE LOCAL”.

I also created and published a website, (not all that hard to do !), documenting the construction and operation of the railroad in the basement. With enough content on the website, I was able to compile more than enough points to qualify for the Author Certificate and that came in December, 2020. I submitted the application for the Master Model Railroader at the same time as the Author application, and was advised of the approval before the end of 2020.

I am grateful to the Achievement Program Coordinators and all those other NMRA members involved for their efforts in keeping this program going under our very restricted conditions right now. I encourage every modeler to investigate pursuing the AP Program and thank the NMRA and my Mentors for their encouragement.