Sunday, May 01, 2011

COUSIN CONFESSIONS

Some say that confession is good for the soul - so I am happy to see that after 50 years, at least of a few of my cousins are fessing up that they touched my HO model train despite the onerous "DO NOT TOUCH" sign.  Here are a few pictures of the train in the basement of our New Paris CR142 house:

Click to Enlarge

My good friend Johnny Johns and I spent countless hours designing and building the 4' X 8' layout.  We carefully constructed each component - train, buildings, cars, trucks, track, roads, vegetation, and people, and we even strung thread between all of the telephone poles to add to the reality of the model.  What we did not want is fat-fingered cousins tampering with our master piece!!  But recently, a couple of cousins have spontaneously confessed that indeed they ignored the sign and touched the train.  Oh well, it must not have been too disruptive because Johnny and I would have surely noted.

6 comments:

Cuzzin Steve said...

I used to pick my nose and stick the boogers on the underside of the layout. JUST KIDDING! I've thought and thought and can't remember the train set, though am sure I must've seen it.

DES said...

Steve - I am pretty sure that I would have caught you with the booger trick because I kept close tabs on my train!! Jog the memory - down in the basement, as you entered the huge room, there was a long built-in table along the north [on your left] wall. On top of that, I mounted a 4 x 8 piece of plywood to use as the base for the layout. One of the problems is that it was right behind the one end of the ping pong table, and thus errant balls would sometimes wipe out a tree or person in the landscape :-)

Anonymous said...

Ok, here goes. I remember you beeing very anal about that train. You wouldn't even let us stand too close because you didn't want us to breeth on it. One time when you were not around I actually blew on the grass to see if it would really move and sure enough... it did. I already feel better.

Cousin Sherry

DES said...

Cousin Sherry - LOL! However, your sneaky blowing just proves why I had to be so vigilant about you ragamuffins :-) The grass was probably the most difficult to work with - I glued most of it down, but because it was such a fine powder, there was still a lot of loose material. I probably thought the blown grass was due to an errant ping pong ball!

Anonymous said...

I would have gladly let cousins, nephews, and assorted urchins touch my stuff. My big problem was having it stole.

Anonymous said...

Dr S,
Looks kinda corny in the photos. My memory was of a very realistic layout. Guess it was for a little kid.
Ash