Well, I didn’t like to write this, but I bleeve that we live in two entirely disparate cultures. When I first set out my track, around Fall of 2002, there were four or five youngsters living in house adjacent to ours - we live on a kind of a corner of a dead-end street, and we are overlooked in back by four other houses, all of whom had children of a suitable train age…
For the first few times I ran during that late Fall, I’d put up a ‘trains today’ sign, in the hope of getting some interest going, the way one does, knowing that there are at least TWO other live-steam railway modellers in the village.
Zero interest.
I was out washing the cars one morning and one of the locals came across the street and asked me what I meant by putting up the ‘trains today’ sign. I explone that it was because I was running trains in my backyard and was keen to foster interest in the neighbourhood.
Well, said the person, I guess that’s a different approach than offering sweeties, and off he walked. I was so totally dumbstruck that I couldn’t think of any reply, more with anger than anything else.
Since then, TBH, I’ve never bothered asking anybody around, except people I know who also have trains that are part of our model railway group.
tac
Ottawa Valley GRS
PS - both other live-steamers in the village are in the same 16mm Association as I am, and I know them both by sight. Neither have ever had an open house get-together, and I found out about them at another meet near Cambridge a few years back when we got talking about how far we’d come to the meet. They both run 32mm track, rather than the 45mm that I run on, and although all my narrow gauge locos have adjustable gauge axles, no invitations have ever been forthcoming. Seems that they don’t talk to each other, either.
