Andy

(aka Andym)

I am very honoured and happy to be part of the S Scale Workshop.  I’m not quite sure why they asked me to join the group.  I guess they felt sorry for me that I had no place to run my equipment.

I started out in trains when I got my first American Flyer train set in 1956.  It was the Crusader set with a Reading Atlantic, a Seaboard boxcar, a Penssy gondola, a B&O hopper and a caboose.  The loco smoked made choo-choo sounds and was S gauge.  Beauty, eh?

The problem was that not one of the real steamers that I saw had American Flyer on their tenders so I was a little dismayed.  They all had funny little wafers that read Canadian National.

In the mid 1960’s I became enamoured with CNR wood sheathed cabooses and wanted to build one for my Flyer.  When I asked around the hobby shops about this, they told me that S Gauge was dead and that you could not get anything in it.  At the time this, was not true but I didn’t know it.  Instead, I bought a George Taylor HO CNR caboose kit and went into HO for the next 35 years.

In 2000, I had the chance to move back into S but from a scale perspective.  My daughter was interested in the Flyer every Christmas so after doing some research to buy her a cheap Flyer car, I discovered a viable S scale marketplace where I could even get a Simon Parent designed CNR Mogul kit.  That and 8 rung ladders on ARR boxcars made my mind up to switch back to my favourite size.  And now I have all the equipment that I need to run a CNR branchline operation in S.  I even have a CNR wood sheathed caboose from Ridgehill models that I built up as CNR 77365 which was the prototype the George Taylor HO caboose kit was designed from.  (Yes, Luke the cycle is complete.)

Even though I still have my Flyer, I use P64 wheelsets and Sergent couplers on my scale equipment whenever possible.

When I’m not working on trains or being the gofer of M.L.W. Services, I write music and perform.