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| My name is Tom Farin. I come from a railroad family. My great-grandfather worked for a predecessor of the Chicago & Northwestern in Green Bay, WI as an engineer. I still have a logbook he kept listing his switch engine pickups and setouts. His son, Bill, my grandfather, was also an engineer for the C&NW. Bill drove steam passenger trains out of Green Bay. One of my modeling projects is to model a C&NW Pacific that was assigned to his division, an engine he probably drove from time to time. One of my dad's favorite memories is the time Grandpa Bill and one of his engineer buddies were playing with my dad's new Lionel set. They ran the engines into each other breaking the headlight of one of the engines. Bill Farin died when my dad was in high school. My grandmother married another railroader a few years later. Tom MacAllister, my namesake, was a conductor for the C&NW. Some of my favorite memories were taking the train to Milwaukee or Chicago and visiting the zoo or museums. My family accumulated a fair amount of railroad memorabilia in those years. Much of it was contributed to the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay. My dad bought me a Lionel set as a child. My brothers and I spent hours playing with trains. After I went to college, my interest in railroading laid dormant for a couple of decades. In the intervening 20 years, I remodeled and wired houses, raised one family and began a second, developed a keen interest in history, and started two different technology companies. My interest in railroading resurfaced about 10 years ago when I bought some HO equipment and began work on my first model railroad. Model railroading combines my interest in building things, messing with electronics, my interest in history, and renews my relationship with my family's history. It also allows me to apply a piece of my Agricultural degree (in the garden rather than in the field). It seems like we always moved about the time I was ready to run trains for the first time. So I never had the opportunity to enjoy running trains on either of the two HO layouts I built. But building them is fun too. I also wired a large kids club HO layout that sat on the floor of the NMRA Annual Convention when it was in Madison, WI a few years back. About 8 years ago, I bought a small amount of G scale stuff, two LGB engines, some track and some rolling stock. It sat in storage except for the occasional circle around the Christmas tree and temporary grass layout. In 2001 I got serious, giving away most of my HO stuff and investing heavily in large scale rolling stock. I worked on a garden layout all summer of 2001. I was laying track when my wife decided she wanted to move again. In spite of my protests, she convinced me to look at the new place. WOW! Four acres of land, mostly in grass and plantings, a 30 by 50 foot Cleary metal shed, and a 50 by 75 foot pond. The summer of 2003 is seeing construction of my new road. Check the railroad section of the site for details.
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(c) 2007 Iron Horse 1:29 |