Everyone has a backstory–the account of their beginnings and how they came to where they are and who they have become. My backstory begins on a farm in West Central Missouri situated between two railroad towns. To our north was the small town of Higginsville, Missouri which sat on the Gulf Mobile & Ohio Railroad (GM&O). This line originally belonged to the Chicago & Alton Railroad, or Alton Road, and was a primary corridor between Chicago and Kansas City. Today that line belongs to CPKC.
My Dad regularly purchased livestock feed and supplements in fifty pound bags, shipped by the pallet in boxcars to the local team track on the GM&O in Higginsville. I can still remember being a young boy–five, six, seven years old–climbing around on those boxcars as my Dad and other men loaded those bags from the boxcar to my Dad’s truck. The railroad equipment seemed so big and impressive to me as a small boy, which it was. I particularly remember scouring the ground around the team track to find railroad artifacts. Of particular interest to me were the metal security seals–precursor to the modern day zip tie I suppose–that were broken and discarded as to cars were opened and unloaded. I wish a few of those survived in my possession today.
To our south was my hometown, Warrensburg, Missouri. It sat on the Missouri Pacific Sedalia Subdivision, the original MoPac line between St. Louis and Kansas City. Today that line belongs to the Union Pacific Railroad. Again, as a child I remember being in town, usually to visit my grandmother, and hearing the horns and the road of prime movers from MoPac SD40-2s, GP38-2s, Dash-7s, as well as the patchwork of early Amtrak locomotives tearing through town. I was overjoyed when we were close enough to count the cars and wave to the conductor in the caboose. Later I would attend middle school and high school in buildings that sat directly beside those tracks. The sounds of passing trains were not a distraction but rather a normal part of every day’s routine.
It would be two decades before I would discover and fall in love with the hobby of scale model railroading. I didn’t know any model railroaders as a kid, nor did I have any railroad employees in my family or as close friends. One thing was certain, however, I loved trains and I was fascinated by their operation. I was a railfan long before I was a modeler. For that matter, I was a railfan long before I knew what a railfan was. I didn’t own a camera, and I don’t have much memorabilia from those railfanning days. What I do have are some incredible images indelibly etched in my mind and the feelings of excitement that those experiences brought that would in part shape whom I am for life.
