Taking Bearings

A steam engine puffs,

wheels chatter, and whistles blow

around childhood tracks

Christmas echoes across time

Toys from a bygone era

Nostalgic rhythms

passed down for new ears to hear

and new hands to guide

Warmth, laughter, and childhood dreams

of lives lived rounding the rails

Vintage Lionel electric trains and accessories, running under a Christmas tree on platforms wired and layouts designed by my grandfather, father, myself, and my children sparked early interest in science and engineering across the generations.

With Owen, and other grandchildren who may follow, a fifth generation will have a chance to see what in these old toy trains inspires them.

Run on simple wiring and circuits, they have endured into a world of transistors semiconductor chips and microcircuitry. Still, much more lives on in them.

At the end of WWII, my grandfather bought a Lionel train set with his Army pay. He gave it gave it to my father, who later passed it on to me. As a child I built platforms and expanded the set and accessories. As an adult I engineered new platforms and switches for my children. We’ve always had the train around the Christmas tree.

In years we spent Christmas away from our homes in Texas, Colorado, or along the Alabama Gulf Coast, the train, transformer, and at least enough track for a simple layout went with us.

Thank goodness for voltage converters.

Time transforms innocence and the original train certainly reflects what was valued when the train and its accessories were crafted (generally 1942 to the late 1950s). These were the toys that Greatest Generation that won WWII bought for their children and put around their Christmas trees.

Just like poetry, prose, and music, toys are defined by and reflect both the era and those who created them. These were the toys that reflected both nostalgia for the railroads that helped build America and which materials symbolized the time or were thought essential to the economy.  Their hazards to health and the environment were not yet known or accepted.

Our toy train, for example,  runs on imaginary coal and uses mildly toxic pellets to produce smoke. A toy tank car pretends to carry fossils fuels, a toy cattle car carries toy cows to slaughter for red meat, and an open toy car carries wood from felled forests. The Baby Ruth car may amuse and confound future generations allowed only the occasional organic juice lollypop.

The caboose, already absent from many real-world trains, may serve is a reminder of job loss resulting from technological advances in railroad operations and switching. Hopefully it will also spur interest in people who devoted their lives to working on the railroads.

Even the accessories may not escape future critical scrutiny. The toy trees through which the toy train passes on the platform at Sibley are actually typical of a monoculture replanting that thwarts biodiversity.

The windmill on the platform, representative of the old windmill on the ranch outside San Saba, may seem more familiar to future generations. They may not see a windmill as a way to pump water from the ground below arid cactus and rock-strewn pastures, but rather as an integral component of future alternative and renewable energy grids.

If the idyllic Victorian-era skater scene that the train has wound past for many years survives, future generations will surely note both its shortcomings with regard stereotypes depicted and people not represented. Hopefully, however,  future generations will still find both amusement and enchantment in the fantasy they offer.  Rather than spurring disdain for a world long passed into history, I hope they gain new insights and appreciation for the beauty of their richer world.

There is of no value in hating the past, nor hating those who lived lives set in a vastly different context than the contemporary world. They, and the events you hate are unaffected by your disdain of them. There is, however, always value in studying and learning from the past.

I also hope that future generations will understand and graciously interpret the intentions of their ancestors. Often what was heralded or well-intended in one generation can generate reflexive appall in subsequent generations.

In the 80s, for example, after months of research conducted in libraries still a decade away from putting resources online, I decided to paint the lantern-carrying lineman black to acknowledge the fact that the vast majority of line and switchmen of the era the trains represented were black. In the 1980s all the people in accessories were white, and so painting the switchman black was an honest attempt to be historically accurate.

Such was the well-intentioned reason of the day.

How this act may be interpreted by future generations is unknowable – especially if remains easy to be “cancelled” for what may be then characterized as –even if unintentional – an unacceptable insult, insensitivity, or other transgression.

Although seemingly insufferable, such social convulsions are, however, quite normal and –if turned constructive rather than destructive — arguably healthy for society.  Thomas Jefferson  defended the early chaos and pains of the French Revolution in Paris by observing, “The Earth belongs to the Living.”

Just as generations have transformed and tinkered with these trains and toys, future generations must–and will–reshape the world.

In this Sisyphean task, I wish them genuine good fortune. Mistakes will be made, madness will often displace reason, and modern inequities and intolerance will often simply replace more ancient inequities and intolerance. One can only hope that such tumult ultimately moves us collectively toward a more equitable and peaceful world.

So that I could pass on a train to each of my children,  over the years I collected four copies of every car (and all accessories). It literally took me 20 years. Along the way I swooped in on dozens of Ebay actions and made friends with antique train dealers in both Texas and Colorado.

So that one copy would not be favored over another, I mixed cars from the original into each set so that every set has some original cars and accessories from the original set my grandfather first gave my father. Only I know the distribution and which cars are original. That is a secret I will take to the grave.

My children will face similar challenges for their children, but I am sure they are up to the challenge.  Accordingly, this will be truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Every generation may, of course, add their own traditions.  My family liked writing short notes and stuffing them in the boxcar.  When I flying in the Navy and doing other dangerous things, the notes were also  a way that I could ensure that if  the worst happened — or for any reason that I was not home for Christmas — that there would be a message of love from me from them to hold.  A few still remain in the train at Sibley.

Across the generations, many childhood days were distilled into maintaining and operating this train. It was the ultimate toy in many ways because my mind could travel along the rails through worlds that I could envision building. Not only was this train a practical introduction to electricity and mechanical things, it opened my minds to thinking about what kind world I might one day want to help shape.

I even created coveted “snow days” for my fantasy world. I manifested disasters for my train platform in the form of massive blizzards emanating from cans of fake snow that would then take days to fully clean away.  ‘

This train absorbed my dreams and returned endless hours of joy. My greatest joy is, however, is now found in passing the joy it brought me on to yet another new generation. To them I hope to say one day when they are old enough to understand, “Please learn, remake, and pass on.”

Listen for those of us who came before you. You might feel us in the woosh and clatter as a fast  train clings perilously to a curve, see us in the wisps of smoke curling upward from the locomotive,  or hear us in the whistle’s full-throated celebration of childhood.

K. Lee Lerner

Christmas, 2015

For my grandchildren: Owen Cafferty Lerner , Cary Cafferty Lerner, and Penelope Shipley.