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Re: (erielack) Re: Growing Up Along EL and the Predecessors (was NYC-Bingo)

Note: I didn't mean to write so much, but it's hard to boil something like
this down into a few sentences. Even at a few pages in length, it is still
missing a lot!

I have always been a fan of trains, since as far back as I can remember. I
come by it honestly as my dad was a railfan and his father always had liked
trains. Both of them had good sized collections of Lionel trains, I still have
them both packed away in storage. Some of my earliest memories are of running
Lionel trains.

I wasn't specifically an EL fan until the mid-1970's. Growing up in Buffalo,
NY, the EL was the #2 RR in town. Both the EL's ex-DL&W and ex-Erie Black Rock
branches were just over a mile from my house, but the NYC's Belt Line was just
down the street and also ran behind my grade school, so that's where I did
most of my train watching. My earliest memories of exposure to the EL were
from Shoshone Park, which was hard up against the Erie and DL&W embankments at
Main Street. I remember EL F units pulling trains past there. They were much
more interesting than the black NYC RSes and Geeps that ran by school. When I
was about 13 (1974) I wandered down the NYC Belt Line to Black Rock and
"discovered" the EL yard. Further exploration led me up the DL&W to
International Junction and the DL&W's truss bridge over the Erie's Niagara
Falls branch. Aside from Dad occasionally mentioning the EL, the "Lackamoney"
and the "Weary Erie," our Lionel Erie bay window caboose and animated Erie
"Cop & Hobo" gondola and my limited viewing of EL trains passing here and
there, I just didn't know much about the EL. I had N scale and HO scale
layouts in my teens, but I never had much EL equipment. My first "hard-core"
EL experience came about completely by accident. I was 15 years old and
stumbled upon Erie's FW Tower when I was 15 years old walking the old NYC line
from Buffalo's Exchange St. Station. I had no idea where the tracks I was
walking on went to, but I knew they went somewhere. There was rust on the
rails, but no so heavy that it appeared to be abandoned. There had definately
been a train on it sometime in the recent past. I figured it was the old Erie
Downtown line because they led to an old freight house which had Erie markings
on it. After wandering almost a mile amongst industrial looking buildings and
weedy grass lots I crossed under the Seneca Street bridge (since removed) and
before me was a Railfan's Paradise!  This was one of the busiest looking rail
intersections I had ever seen at that point. All sorts of rail lines crossed
and fanned out in all directions to the great beyond. In the middle of all
this trackage pandemonium was an apparently abandoned interlocking tower. I
had come across many old towers in my wanderings on the area Central and DL&W
lines and had even managed to get into a few through the courtesy of local
vandals. I, being the curious teen-aged railfan trespasser that I was, decided
to hike up the stairs and see if the door was open. I was sure it was 
abandoned and had been nailed shut or locked up, but it sure couldn't hurt to
look! Boy was I surprised when not only was the door unlocked but when I
opened it and went inside there was a towerman sitting at his desk talking on
the phone, OH NO! I hastily apologized for intruding upon his domain and
begged forgiveness explaining that I had thought it to be an abandoned
building and just wanted to see if the levers (the interlocking machine) were
still in place.  To my astonishment he was more than happy to see me and was
one of the friendliest guys I have ever met on any of my railroad safaris. He
had some great stories and was a great teacher. Scotty Whitehead was the
regular first trick operator at FW. He was more than happy to show me the
ropes and instruct me in the finer points of lining routes and setting
signals. I got to talk to the DM tower operator (down the PRR at their
interlocking with the DL&W City Branch) and signal maintainers. I got to know
some of the train crews and other "regulars" at FW. If it had been 50 years
earlier it would probably have become my training for working for the
railroad. I was always welcome at FW after that. The second time I visited
Scotty asked "You're traveling light today, eh?" (he was Canadian) I had no
idea what he meant. After a few moments of me not getting the hint he
explained that I wasn't carrying any doughnuts and coffee! You can bet I had
some with me the next time!  I don't know why I never took a camera to FW.
That's one of my biggest regrets about the past. To this day I have found 
precious few photos of FW, but I do have one shot by Matt Wronski of Scotty at
the levers in FW. To make a long story shorter, I made a great friend and got
some experience (and exercise) around a real live Armstrong interlocking
tower. Even though it had just turned into Conrail, my times at FW are by far 
my fondest EL memories and probably was one of the primary catalysts of my
interest in the EL. I'll never forget Scotty Whitehead and FW tower.

Like many people, I was sidetracked from my late teens through my late
twenties by girls, sports, cars and partying, not necessarily in that order.
In the late 1980s I started to get back into trains and modeling again. Dad
and I would take railfanning trips around the northeast. Dad was a rail
history and map nut and it all rubbed direcetly off him and on to me. I became
more  and  more interested railroad history, especially around Buffalo. I
spent a lot of time exploring the EL lines around town and collecting old maps
that showed where all the RR lines were. I'd find out something new and rush
to call him on the phone to discuss it. Then dad died suddenly in the summer
of  1997, which really changed my RR enthusiast life a lot. Up to that time he
had been the only one with whom I had ever shared my love of trains. Because
trains had been such a large part of our experiences together, I looked to
them to stay close to dad after he was gone. I became somewhat fanatical about
it and to some extent I still am. It took a while to hook up with other rail
enthusiasts, but the internet was taking off and it was easy to meet people
who where into trains online. 

I stumbled across the ELHS completely by accident in the fall of 1997, about 3
months after dad died. My ISP business was just starting to take off and Devan
Lawton's wife, Louise, was a customer. Somehow I ended up talking to Devan and
he told me to contact Ron Dukarm about the ELHS annual meeting that happened
to be close by in Hamburg that year. I joined and went to the meeting and the
rest is history, I'm certainly a big EL fan for life. The following spring I
went to the ELHS meeting in Edgewater, NJ and bought a bunch of N and HO scale 
EL equipment. I now have a pretty large collection of both, but I have decided
to concentrate on N scale so I'll plan on selling almost all of the HO as soon
as life settles down enough for me to unpack and catalog all of it.

I had built a some rail related websites and they were starting to take on a
life of their own so in February of 1998 I decided to register Railfan.net.
because I had a lot of unused internet resources I figured why not let other
rail enthusiasts and historians use some of them. A few years later it was one
of the largest concentrations of rail related things on the web. I had met
George Elwood at that 1997 ELHS meeting and he had complained of the lack of
web space available for his site. I offered George free web hosting until his
site grew so large it was using as much resources as all the rest of our
sites combined. At that point, George offered to raise money to continue to
have us host his site. Back in November of 2000 we started hosting the EL mail
list and have ever since. We also a number of other EL related websites and
societies here. While we no longer offer free web hosting to new site
customers, we continue to offer pro-bono services to well over 100 rail and
historical related sites. In addition to allowing me to give something back to
the community that shares my love of all things rail related, I think it is a
fitting memorial to my dad, who truly loved trains.

The internet is a wonderful thing. Every day I get to learn something new
about the EL and/or its predecessors!

Henry

J. Henry Priebe Jr.    Blue Moon Internet Corp Network Administrator
www.bluemoon.net       Internet Access & Web Hosting
www.railfan.net        Railfan Network Services



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