Today is Father’s Day. I was lucky to be loved today, and to be able to spend the day with some of my children. I was gifted a set of tools to work leather, which is very exciting to me because there are some basic projects I want to do, and I got an introductory tool set that looks like a lot more than enough to do what I want, and give me a feel for the craft.
Today I also happened to look on eBay and found the extremely rare train engines I needed to finish my consist for the model railroad I want to build. There is one train in the world I can model if I only have enough room to model one train in the world, and that is the one I bought the cars to, but then found that the full set of engines was nearly impossible to come by. It is going to be a model of the train I rode with my mom when I was nine years old from Salt Lake to Denver; the California Zephyr!
As fate would have it, the California Zephyr was absolutely legendary in America, with stainless steel panels and several dome cars for viewing outside the train. It was pulled from san Francisco with three engines to handle the steep grades along the way. The route from Denver to Chicago was pretty well flat, and only required two engines to pull it. But the Salt Lake to Denver leg was mountain grade, and required four engines! Keep in mind that the California to Utah leg is also mountainous!
The ride mom and I took came at a special time in my life, not just because I was a nine year old boy, and not just because it was the first time I had ever rode on a train, but also because mom was carrying my little brother at the time, and was not long married to my step-dad. We had travelled a lot when I was little, by bus, in cars, and I with my grandparents. I had even flown alone from northern California to southern, when I was only four years old! As fate would have it, a road trip together when I was in my early twenties would be the last we took together. This train ride was a symbolic journey to the end of a childhood that was just mom and me. It was the end of an era that I am still selfish about now, when I knew her as a relatively young girl herself. Echoes of the hippie that was my mom always called out, but this was a point in her life when she was changing, and growing up too.
It is stirring to have found this rare set on a day like today, when the magnitude of parenthood is already on my mind, and when I can take a moment to not only treasure my children and my role as father, and look back at my mom’s role as a single mom doing everything on her own. It was a pivotal point in my life, as we left behind the old “us” in Salt Lake, and became a family in Denver. Everything changed forever as we snaked our way through the Rockies, rode through the Moffat Tunnel, and descended down into Denver that night.
The seller of the engines promised he would be mailing them out, insured, tomorrow. I really look forward to receiving them! I look forward to completing the consist that will eventually become the model that will serve as a viewing pleasure, and a metaphor for the biggest transition of my young life. I cannot believe I not only found the PB-1 units, but in a whole set of PA-1’s and PB-1’s, making up the complete engine compliment for the most mountainous journey in the United States!