My mother rediscovered 4 prints on Sunday 15-October-2000, that I have been wondering if they even existed for many years. I thought that any pictures of my backyard railroad would have to be a sketch from my memory. I was so happy to see the two pictures of it and the others of an outing with my dad to the live steamers in Griffith Park Los Angeles. All right the gold found was not that funny yellow stuff, but these pictures mean a lot to me.

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The first picture is the loading area for the live steamers. The engines are real steam engines and pull a heavy load of kids and a few adults. One of the adults in the picture (I think he was one of the guys with the a cap) built from scratch that big steam engine that the kid is getting to run. I remember my dad following the builder/owner down to the loading pit to ask him about it. My dad asked "Building that engine from scratch sure would take a lot of time, what does your wife think about it?". The builder/owner quickly said "Well she did get upset and gave me an ultimatum, she said it was either her or the engine. I told her it had been nice knowing her."

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The second picture of the Live Steamers outing shows that when I got interested in trains, I was small enough to easily fit on one of the tiny trains.

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The next picture is of my cousin Kathleen riding the hand car of my train with her dog "Tammy". The track was a simple loop with a hand powered car, but it was my train set.

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The last picture shows the hand car by it self at the edge of the trestle. We lived on a hill, so my dad built a trestle to add a little excitement to the loop.

After mom handed me the pictures, I asked how we got the train set. Apparently my mom was chatting with one of the neighbors on our street, and heard a house wife complaining about having to pack everything up to move and not knowing what to do with that train thing in the back yard. After hearing this mom asked my dad if he was interested. He wasted no time getting the set moved over to our back yard. The track is really rather simple, it was just simple flat iron straps, no flanges. The track was secured to the ties with tight fitting groves cut into the ties. The deep cuts necessitated replacing several ties as they easily broke. I remember that my dad cut his thumb badly when he tried to cut a long piece of stock without a brace. The train set was given away to another family when I grew older. And my club house was built on its site by my grandfather, but that's another story.