The Year 1960...and Chuggington?!?! #modelrailroad #chuggington #modelrailway

Originally, this was going to be a snapshot of the Model Railroad hobby around the year 1960. On the right is an AHM Fairbanks-Morse C-Liner; one of the first plastic bodied diesels made; it is considered a “classic” in HO-scale by many hobby historians. Behind it is a Uhrich stock car, a StromBecker wooden boxcar that has been fitted with trucks and couplers, and three Varney reefers; the middle one weathered. An AHM caboose rounds up the rear.

This train is somewhat typical of the 1950s, with nearly all the rolling stock built from kits. But even as they were still being sold, mass producers like Marx, Tyco/Mantua, American Flyer and Lionel were selling ready-to-run train sets, often through stores. The train on the left was made by Marx, but it was sold by Sears under the Allstate brand. They became the wave of the future as more and more modelers migrated away from scratch-built and kits to ready-to-run models. And they also started what became the "golden age" of model railroading from the 1960s through the 1970s, until the rise of video games and home computers in the 1980s; many a child (myself included) found a train set under the Christmas Tree; which ignited a life-long interest in model railroading.

This "compare and contrast" was going to be the theme of this video. But then something arrived in the mail today -- I finally found a Bachmann Chuggington Wilson at a price I was willing to pay; he came in the mail along with a Bachmann low-sided gondola, and a open car from the Bachmann Thomas line. Wilson is based on an EMD F unit, as you can tell comparing it to the Marx locomotives. I enjoy watching Chuggington with my special needs son, and my grandkids can relate to him too.

So, he ended up barging his way into this video. I had to swap Wilson and the Marx train because the transformer for the layout on the right could not handle the current draw of the open frame (Pitman) motor in the Marx F unit, so I had to run it on the layout on the left instead.

Perhaps that is somewhat symbolic of the hobby, as both Thomas and Friends and Chuggington have somewhat disrupted a hobby that is otherwise obsessed with detail and exact scale, one could say for the good, as they and the Atlas Trainkids line encourage younger boys and girls to get interested. In the meantime, I love the growl of the old-fashioned motors in both the Marx and AHM locomotives in this video.