Homer and the Circus Train

I Just got a copy of Homer and the Circus Train by Hardie Gramatky. My wife was visiting her nephew, and in the lobby of the building was a bookcase with magazines and children's books. She noticed this one and instantly knew I would love it. She took a photo with her iPhone and sent it to me. As she guessed, I loved it. On her next trip to visit her nephew, I went along with a pile of books from my collection (all extras) and asked if I could trade my pile of books for the copy of Homer and the Circus Train. The woman made some jokes about how the book was probably worth lots of money etc, but was convinced to let me trade when she saw that one of the books I had brought was a brand new copy of Green Eggs and Ham which she said was her favorite. I went home with my new treasure. The book is from 1957 and was part of the Greater Victoria Public Library collection before becoming a discard. The book was written by Hardie Gramatky who also wrote Little Toot, another favorite of mine. The list in the back of the book also lists other books by Hardie Gramatky: Little Toot, Hercules, Loopy, Sparky, Bolivar, Nikos and the Sea God, Little Toot on the Thames, Little Toot on the Grand Canal, and Happy's Christmas.
This book features Homer a little circus train who looks a little bit like a few other cabooses I have featured on my blog previously. I absolutely love the artwork throughout the book and this one has made me want to search for more of Hardie's books, especially Sparky, which is about a little trolley car that looks very similar to Homer, except that he is yellow instead of red.

I've Been Working on the Railroad...

Here are two great train related records I picked up this weekend at the local thrift shop.
The first is "The Little Engine that Could" from RCA Victor on two 78 Long Play records and in a nice record jacket with artwork and words inside. The Little Engine that Could was one of the first books I gave to my son. I found a great old vintage copy of the book at a thrift shop and read it to him. He liked it so much that we bought him his own copy reproduction copy of the book for his bookshelf. I'm sure we'll have fun listening to this new version together as well.
I could not find a date anywhere on the jacket or albums, but my guess would be that it is from the 1940's. If you would like to take a listen to this one, you can surf over to Kiddie Records Weekly where they posted a great mp3 file of this recording as well as many more vintage kids records.
The second record is "Railroad Sounds - The Sounds of a Vanishing Era" from 1957. What we get here is literally 20+ minutes of clickety clack, clickety clack, whistle whistle, chug chug. I am going to guess that this wasn't a huge seller. Hard to imagine someone pulling this off the shelve and putting it on the turn table, turning up the volume and sitting back to listen to the sounds of trains.

Little Golden Book Monday #56

Today's Little Golden Book is The Little Red Caboose from1953. When I found this book, I immediately thought of my favorite book about a caboose called The Caboose Who Got Loose which was written by Bill Peet in 1971.
The story of the Little Red Caboose see the little caboose saving the day when a large train full of cars beings to loose steam going up a mountain the the little caboose puts on its breaks and stops the train from rolling back down the mountain long enough for another large steam engine to come up behind them and push them all safely up the hill.
The Caboose Who Got Loose on the other hand is about Katy Caboose. She is sad that she is always at the end of the train, and nobody ever bothers to wave at her like they do the engines up front. One day, she accidentally becomes detached from her train and ends up rolling out of control until she flies off the tracks and ends up high in a tree. She ends up finding happiness in high in the tree as as she has a wonderful view of the valley, and many of the animals end up using her as a shelter from the weather.

Train Scale HO

One of the coolest Christmas presents I ever remember receiving was my first train set. I don't remember the exact year, but I would guess it was some time in the mid 70's. It had a green engine, about 3 box cars, a flat bed with 3 removable tractors, an oil tanker, a caboose, and enough track to make an oval, and of course an electic power pack to make the thing run. I remember going out to a lumber yard somewhere to buy a large piece of plywood to nail the track to and setting it up on a table in my room (see photo below).

I remember a Christmas or two later, I received a second train set. This one was the ultra cool "US Army" edition which was all camo green and came with a flatbed with a removable tank on it, a car with a large cannon, a box car with doors that flipped down to revel two swiveling guns, etc. In 1980 we moved into a townhouse which had a basement, and I decided to set up my train in a large way. By this time I have collected all sorts of engines, cars, lots of track, buildings etc. My friend Lew and I started working on building the layout, including sculpted mountains and a complete town (see the accompanying colour photos of the layout as it was being dismantled). When we moved 3 years ago, I had to tear down my train diorama, as there was no way to move it. I took a few photos of the set up before I began dismantling it. I thought a few of the photos looked kinda cool in black and white.




The entire train set now sits in boxes in the basement of our new house, waiting the day my son Kaden asks about it and we can dig it out once again.