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James BaconEditorsChris Garcia garcia@computerhistory.org
 
The Drink Tank Issue 283 - May 2011
 James Bacon & Chris Garcia - Editors
Page 1 - Table of ContentsArt byPage 2 - Editorial by Christopher J GarciaArt byPage 3 -Art byPage 4 -Art byPage 10 -Art by
 
I had a train set when I was a kid. 1860 Briar-wood Dr.’s garage was famous in the neighborhood forthe train set. It was a piece of plywood on top of twosaw-horses. Dad made it himself. I should have knownthat something was up when four year old Chris wasn’tallowed in the garage for a month. The garage was myfavorite place other than the toybox where I’d throwout all my toys and climb in with all my blankets. The ga-rage was transformed, a car never again parking inside.The reason it was famous? It was almost all pa-per.Dad, ever a DIY man, made the buildings fromheavy, folded paper. He’d take them from work andcome home and do his version of origami. It was thekind of origami done with scissors and tape. He’d drawout buildings and then cut them up, fold them intoshape, install them This allowed him to make hundredsof different buildings. Sometimes, he’d improvise, liketaking the Quaker Oats tube and turning it into a grainsilo, or the time he turned a mini cereal box into a sortof Arc de Triumph for the layout. In the three years thatI was interested in it, there were hundreds of differentbuildings, that we’d cycle in and out. Dad even made athree story firehouse that was a near-exact duplicateof the one that he worked at!Of course, the trains were the cheapest onesever made.I swear they were made from former plasticmilkjugs. They were cheap, something like 3 dollars acar, and they were all-plastic. You could only run theengine for a few minutes before you had to stop andlet it cool or little whisps of acrid black smoke wouldcome off of it. It was a piece of crap, but it was mine.Well, it was actually Dad’s, but I got to play withit.I lost interest when I got into baseball and roll-er skates and books and my Fisher-Price tape recorder.I would go in and play with the set-up once in a while,but it never held the sway again. We moved from 1860Briarwood in 1987, a full 9 years after Dad made it, andwe never took it down. It wasn’t until we moved to asmaller apartment that the set-up was tossed, the carsand engine along with it, the paper buildings crumbledup and binned.This issue is about model trains, one of thosethings that a lot of us have in common. We loved themonce, some of us forever, and we all have stories aboutthem.And these are ours...
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