© 1996, by Scott T. Hanson
1926
Tucker Payson Tyler had been born on Christmas Day, 1918, in his grandparent's house near the Western Promenade in Portland, Maine. The only time Tuck's mother had not lived in her parent's home was the three days of her honeymoon, spent at the Falmouth Hotel on Middle Street. She never moved out because her new husband left for the war in Europe right after their honeymoon. Tuck's father never returned from the war. The boy grew up in the big late-nineteenth century wooden house with his mother and grandparents.
When he was eight years old Tucker came upon a dusty box of electric trains in the attic. He had never seen electric toy trains before. He recognized the name on the box, "Lionel," from his race car set. His race car set was very important to him. It was the only gift his father had a chance to give him, before he was even born. When Tuck's mother found out they were going to have a baby she sent a telegram to his Daddy at the army training camp. His Daddy went out and bought the race car set and sent it to Portland for the expected baby before he got on the ship to Europe. Tuck cherished the race cars because they were from his father, but they were not much fun for one child to play with, there was no one to race. Inside the box in the attic the big metal engine and cars were painted maroon and had gold lettering on them. The boy was fascinated. His grandmother told him they had been his uncle's when he was a boy. His uncle had also gone to the war and not come back. That evening his grandfather carried the box down to Tuck's room. Declaring that the trains were too "old fashioned" to be played with, he allowed as they would be fine to set up on the bookcase for the boy to look at. Tuck already knew that his grandparents set a great store by his uncle's things and tried to hide his disappointment as his grandfather carefully placed the trains on top of the bookcase, out of reach.
From his bed Tucker could hear the real trains coming and going down at Union Station while looking at his uncle's toy train. He could tell the passenger trains from the freight trains by their sounds. The passenger trains came fast and stopped at the station while the freight trains were slow and long and didn't stop. He knew that the freight trains were filled with lumber and paper from the sawmills and paper mills in Maine's great forests and with cotton and wool cloth from the tremendous brick textile mills on the state's rivers. There were whole trains of cars filled with potatoes from the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad in far, far northern Maine. There were also cars filled with other kinds of food grown in the state and caught off the coast. And there were loads and loads from the factories with their tall smoke stacks, like the Portland Stove Foundry and the Portland Company where they made steam locomotives. Tuck sometimes thought it was as if all of Maine was being loaded into boxcars and onto ships at the Portland wharves to be sent all over the world.
He loved trains. Every summer he and his mother would take the big Maine Central train to the pretty village of Wiscasset. From the train he would see ships being built at the vast shipyard in Bath as they passed over the river on the long bridge. At Wiscasset they would get on the little two-foot gauge train to Alna to visit his other grandparents. The train passed right by their old white clapboard farmhouse. Tuck would walk out past the weathered barn and over the stone wall, then along the narrow tracks with his grandfather, going down to the Sheepscot River to fish. In the fall he would go with his mother and her parents up through Crawford Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. They spent a week every year at the Crawford House. Grand Ma always called it the "Anniversary Trip" and Grampa would say she meant the "Honeymoon Trip," with a twinkle in his eye. From the train Tucker got to see the great Maine and New Hampshire Granite Company quarry at Redstone where the whole end of the mountain was slowly being cut away. Grampa told him that stone from the quarry had been used to build Grant's Tomb in New York City. It sounded very grand to Tuck. Just before the train began the long steep pull up along the side of the mountains in the notch it passed a junction with a logging railroad. This railroad had odd looking engines with big gears and little wheels instead of the big driver wheels and rods on the Maine Central engines. Sometimes the family got to see one of the odd engines coming down out of the woods hauling a long train of loaded log cars from the valleys far back in the mountains. From here on Tuck always sat on the right side of the train so he could look down the sheer mountainside to the river far below. On the high trestles and bridges he felt as though the train was flying through mid-air. From the hotel porch he spent his days watching trains steam up and down through the notch.
More often than trains, Tuck got to ride the trolleys on Portland's tree-lined streets. The city was so filled with trees that it was called the "Forest City". He would go shopping with his mother in the big department stores on Congress Street, near Grampa's office. Momma always had him recite a poem as they passed the seated statue in Longfellow Square. Like every child in Portland Tuck knew that the great poet had also walked the red brick sidewalks of the city as a boy. After shopping they would stop in Monument Square to pay their respects to Grand Ma's Papa. On the tall Redstone Granite base of the Civil War memorial it said "Portland - To Her Sons Who Died For The Union". Standing on the base was the impressive bronze statue of Victory. Tucker thought she was rather fierce and frightening but was respectful enough not to say so. Other times they would ride the trolley across the new Million Dollar Bridge to South Portland just for the view of the harbor and city. From way up on the bridge Tucker could see the docks and wharves, steam ships and sail boats, and the big brick and granite warehouses on the waterfront. Sometimes he could see ships unloading huge piles of coal onto the wharves, to be used to heat the houses of Maine in winter and fuel the massive boilers that powered the factories.
On sunny summer days they took a picnic and rode all the way to the Eastern Promenade. Before eating they would fly kites in the breezes that always blew up off the harbor. Usually he would see several trains pass below on the Grand Trunk Railway tracks by the water. He would ask which were the grain trains from Canada going to the towering grain elevators near the Grand Trunk Station. Momma said that grain from the elevators was loaded into ships and sent all over the world. They brought it to Portland in the trains, she said, because all the ports in Canada froze solid in the winter and Portland Harbor didn't. Tuck was glad he didn't live where it was any colder in the winter than in Maine! One year the whole family had taken the trolley, which Grand Ma and Grampa didn't usually do, out to Riverton Park on the northern edge of the city. Grampa rode the Ferris wheel with Tucker but Momma and Grand Ma said they'd just watch.
Then there were the special trips. They were his favorites. They were a great adventure where he got to visit exotic and foreign places, without leaving Portland. These adventures only occurred when his mother and grandmother were out shopping or visiting and his grandfather was at the office. On these days Tuck would be sure to be in the kitchen early with Mrs. Cicconi. Well before noon she would look skeptically into the pantry and announce that it was time to stock the "lather." They would catch the trolley on Vaughn Street and ride along the granite cobbled streets through town to the corner of Middle and India Streets. Tuck knew that India was far away and very exotic. They would get off next to the Grand Trunk Station and make the rounds of the neighborhood shops. They'd go to the butcher and the green grocer and the bakery and other shops the boy wasn't sure what to call. The shops were busy and loud. Mrs. Cicconi rapidly spoke a language Tuck didn't understand. So did everyone else, though not, it seemed, all the same language. Finally they would go down to the wharves on Commercial Street. This was his favorite street. The wide street was a maze of railroad tracks. The massive steam engines came right down the middle of the street with their freight cars. They came right through the middle of the trucks and wagons and trolleys and cars. Crossing to the wharves was exciting.
Once Mrs. C had found the fish she wanted and told the man twice not to deliver before three o'clock, (she spoke English to the fish man) she would tell Tuck that there was just about enough time for tea. They would walk back up Franklin Street to her sister's apartment. This was the most exotic part. It was unlike any place else Tucker ever went. None of the homes of his relatives or friends was anything at all like it. The apartment seemed crowded to overflowing with children, and objects, and smells, and sounds from another land. Nobody spoke English and Tuck stayed close to Mrs. C. Her sister placed delicious foods and pastries in front of the boy while the women talked and talked. Mrs. C always called in her nieces and nephews before leaving and kissed each one. Tuck asked once why she kissed all the children. "Cause the war took me husband and the 'fluenza took me babies" was all she said. She had cried all the way back on the trolley until they reached the big quiet houses and spacious lawns of Tuck's neighborhood. She looked down at him and declared that "Some ain been so lucky's me," and kissed him too.
As Tucker's ninth birthday neared, which was of course Christmas Day, his grandfather began to act somewhat strangely. There was a twinkle in his eye all the time. He seemed almost boyish himself. Several times he told Tuck about the cast iron and wooden toy trains he had played with as a lad. This was before most houses had electricity. He told of pushing them all through the house and how his father had made a station for the trains out of a biscuit box and paint. He also told of riding the horse cars, which were like trolleys but pulled by horses because the city didn't have electric trolleys yet, down to watch the construction of Union Station. He said it seemed it would never be finished.
One day when Tuck was home from school with a cold there was a great commotion down in the hall. First he heard a truck stop out front and then the doorbell rang. His grandfather's voice boomed through the usually quiet house, "Its here girls!" He yelled, "Quick, Mary." Before Tucker could get out of bed to investigate his mother slipped into his room. Closing the door she said he should be sleeping but since he wasn't she'd read him a story. When he went down to dinner later, he was feeling better then, he looked for whatever had caused the ruckus. There was nothing out of place or unusual anywhere. However, he did notice that now his mother and grandmother and even Mrs. C had twinkles in their eyes too.
As they were finishing dinner that night Mr. Pitt came in from the kitchen. Mr. Pitt worked for Grampa's sister at the old fashioned house on Spring Street where Grampa had grown up. He told Grampa that he had put "sompin" for him in the garage, and said he had come in to tell him a message. Tuck didn't understand the message at all but the adults laughed and laughed. The message from Grampa's sister was that the next time he wanted something from her attic, "He can just come over here and ruin his own dress in the dust." Grampa said "Well Bradley, I guess we know what she wants for Christmas" and they all laughed harder.
It was snowing when Mr. Pitt next appeared. Christmas was three days away and he'd brought their Christmas tree. He and Grandpa set the tree up in the parlor and then he and Grand Ma went to the attic for the boxes of ornaments and lights. The men put on the colored lights. Then Tuck and his mother decorated the tree while his grandmother fussed about being careful on the ladder and how fragile her "Mamma's Bohemian glitters" were. The tree nearly reached the high, high ceiling and when they were done it was beautiful. There was one more thing to do. Grampa and Mr. Pitt went up to Momma's room, next to Tuck's, and very carefully carried down her doll house. They set it on the carpet so gently that not even the tiny china plates on the miniature dining room table moved. "There" said Tucker's mother, "It is just like when I was a girl."
"Almost," remarked Grampa "almost....."
Tucker always received his birthday present on Christmas Eve. His mother had told him that birthdays had to be special days and there was no reason why he should only have one when other children had two special days, their birthday and Christmas. This year after dinner, and birthday cake for dessert, Grampa carried in a heavy box from his study. Tuck had to stand up at the table to unwrap the paper and open the box. Inside, wrapped in fresh brown paper, there were trains. Cast iron trains and wooden trains, old and used but clean as a whistle. They were Grampa's trains. The same ones he had played with as a boy. Tucker thought they were the best birthday present ever. Later that night Grampa set the trains up on Tucker's bookcase along with his uncle's train. These too were only to be looked at, they were too "old fashioned" to be played with. Tuck didn't mind, really. He knew they were very special. Looking up at them he could imagine Grampa as a little boy. That Christmas Eve he drifted off to sleep thinking of Grampa, as a little boy, pushing his trains all through the house.
Usually on Christmas morning Tucker woke up well before the adults and had to wait forever for them to get up. He wasn't allowed downstairs until the whole family went down. This year the adults were already up when he awoke. He could hear Mrs. Cicconi in the kitchen pouring coal into the stove. Grand Ma and Momma were in the next room whispering and giggling! Grampa was standing in Tuck's door looking like the cat that ate the canary. Almost skipping over to the bed he said "Look what I found by the chimney, Santa must have dropped it." He handed Tuck a bright softcover booklet, a catalog actually. Across the top of the cover it said "Lionel Electric Trains". Below the words was a picture of a boy running his own railroad. And what a railroad! There were tracks filling the room, with switches and sidings and crossings. There was a long passenger train and a work train with a crane car. There were freight cars and a caboose, a station and a switch tower, a power house, a tunnel, lights and track signals. It was amazing! Inside the catalog page after page was filled with trains.
Before Tucker could even begin to look at all the trains in the catalog his mother and Grand Ma were in the hall and it was time to go downstairs. Grampa said "Lets go see what else Santa left." Tuck went down first. He was almost afraid of what he might, or might not, find. From the bottom of the stairs he could see tracks on the parlor floor. He raced to the door and there it was. The picture on the catalog was real. The big Standard Gauge trains filled the room and every thing in the picture was there. He gasped!
Tucker had the best Christmas ever. Grampa showed him how to run the trains and they ran them together for hours. Later Grampa had to go take a nap and then Tuck ran them himself. The crane really worked and the dining car had tables and chairs in it! The electric engine had headlights that worked and all the passenger cars and buildings were lit as well. The signals changed color and the crossing gates came down as the train passed. Tuck had never been so happy. He finally had trains to play with and he played with them every chance he got all winter.
In March a carpenter came and built shelves in Tucker's room. On Easter weekend Tuck and Grampa took apart the tracks and placed all the trains and accessories on the new shelves. He couldn't run them there but Grampa said they could be set up again downstairs come Thanksgiving. From then on that's what happened. Every Christmas morning Grampa said "Look what Santa dropped by the chimney," as he gave Tuck the new Lionel catalog. Downstairs the layout would be bigger and the new trains and accessories in the catalog would be there. The second year there was an engine with brass pantographs that could be raised or lowered and red and green running lights. All of the trains had shiny copper and brass trim. When Tucker got a massive black steam engine it looked just like the real ones down at Union Station. Each Christmas there were more trains, more track, more buildings, and bridges and signals and more. After he got a trolley Grampa helped him build an Erector Set Ferris wheel for the trolley to run to, just like Riverton Park. When the trains were moved downstairs so was his Lionel race car set, Momma said it was good to have it there to remind them of his Daddy on Christmas. The carpenter came every spring to build more shelves in Tuck's room. Eventually the layout filled the parlor, dining room and hall every winter. Mrs. Cicconi told her sister that it was awful to clean around, but the boy was so happy she didn't mind.
1955
Tucker Payson Tyler had had a happy childhood. He often thought of the train and trolley trips he'd taken with his family, and later with his school friends to ski in North Conway, New Hampshire on winter weekends. And, of course, he thought of his toy trains. By the time he had moved on to skiing and dating he had received enough trains to fill the walls of his room. Not only Lionel, but Ives, American Flyer and others. He realized now that he had been a very fortunate boy.
All of his trains had been packed away for years, ever since his grandparents died and his mother remarried while he was in the South Pacific during the war. His mother and her husband lived in Cape Elizabeth and the big old West End house had been sold. Tuck Tyler and his family had recently moved into their new home in North Deering. He had insisted on a large, high open basement when the architect was designing the house. For six years, since his son was born, he'd been preparing to build a train layout. The Standard Gauge tinplate trains of his childhood were not realistic enough to achieve his goal. Those would be displayed on shelves on the wall. He would use the more realistic, and smaller, O Gauge trains for the layout. He'd discovered after his son Payson's birth that Standard Gauge hadn't been produced since 1939. The post-World War II O Gauge trains were more realistically colored and well detailed. They were perfect for what he had in mind. By the time the new house was finished Tucker Tyler had a good sized stack of cartons filled with orange and blue Lionel boxes. They contained new trains and accessories. He had also managed to pick up some older, pre-war, O Gauge trains that weren't produced anymore.
The idea for the layout was fairly simple, but he spent many hours devising a track plan to make it work. He had visited the Lionel showroom in New York City and seen the amazing layout there. It had Lionel trains running through realistic scenery with scale buildings and details. He decided that his layout would represent the trains, trolleys and places of his childhood memories, of the time between the wars. As an adult he understood that many people had not had an easy time during those years, especially through the Great Depression, but for him the 1920's and 30's had been a happy time. He wanted to include Portland - especially Union Station where all trips had begun and ended, Wiscasset and the two-foot gauge, the shipyard and bridge at Bath, his grand parent's farm in Alna, Crawford Notch with the Crawford House, and North Conway with the ski slopes rising up Mount Cranmore behind the village. Including all he wanted on the layout took careful planning and required many compromises. He couldn't actually build a complete scale model of Portland - it would be bigger than the entire basement. Tuck had to figure out which buildings and features of the city were most important and most memorable. These he included while leaving out the rest. He did the same with the other sites he wanted to represent on the layout. While he wanted the sites of his past clearly recognizable he did not care to attempt to model the trains exactly. There were so many wonderful trains, in the color schemes of railroads from all over America, being produced by Lionel that he couldn't see being limited to the few railroads that actually ran in New England. If he wanted to run Union Pacific engines up Crawford Notch or a Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 engine through Portland Union Station he would. That was part of the enjoyment of creating his own miniature world.
The layout took many years to build. After the benchwork was constructed the tracks were laid and what seemed like a mile of wiring was installed. Mrs. Tyler did almost all the wiring on the layout because she knew much more about it than Tuck. She had worked in the shipyard across the harbor in South Portland during the war. Like many young women who had never before had a job she went to work because so many of the men were off fighting in Europe and the South Pacific. Women did many of the jobs which had only been done by men before the war. At the shipyard she had worked on the electrical systems of the ships they were building for the Navy. Once the trains were running perfectly there were mountains to make and dozens of buildings to construct. Tuck spent many hours in the library studying the geology of Maine and New Hampshire to make sure his mountains looked right. Whenever they traveled around the area they paid attention to what kinds of trees grew along the coast and in the mountains. Mrs. Tyler painted beautiful backdrops for the layout. For the Bath section she painted nearly the entire city on the backdrop because there wasn't enough space to actually build models of the buildings. Tucker Tyler and his son, Payson, spent long days together in the basement. They went together to photograph buildings in downtown Portland and Wiscasset to build their models from. They collected bags and bags of twigs to make trees from. They visited every hobby shop they could find, often. One sad day they stood together and watched the wrecking ball topple Union Stations tall Redstone Granite clock tower. As other sites from his childhood disappeared in the name of urban renewal; his great aunt's house on Spring Street, the Falmouth Hotel where his parents had their three wedded days together, Grampa's office building, the colorful immigrant neighborhood on Franklin Street, Tucker Tyler told stories of these buildings and the people he had known to his son.
At Christmas when Payson was nine years old his grandparents gave him an American Flyer S Gauge train set. Grammy had privately told her daughter, Payson's mother, that it was high time the boy had a train of his own. On Christmas morning Tucker Tyler was standing in his son's door looking like the cat that ate the canary - with the American Flyer catalog in his hand. Under the Christmas tree the sleek streamlined aluminum passenger cars and colorful diesel engines were set up and ready to run. The catalog declared that the S Gauge two-rail track was more realistic than the three-rail O Gauge track. Payson agreed, but decided it wouldn't be nice to tell his father that his trains were better.
Every year on Christmas morning Payson's Dad would give him the new American Flyer catalog and in the living room the layout would be bigger and better. After the Holidays the trains were moved to Payson's bedroom and playroom and set up on the floor. He could run his trains from room to room, even under the bed, all year long. At Thanksgiving they went back to the living room in preparation for Santa's visit. Payson and his Dad worked and played on both layouts together, taking turns.
1996
Tucker Payson Tyler's grand-daughter loved trains. Her earliest memories were of watching Grand Daddy's O Gauge trains climb through Crawford Notch. Her happiest days had been spent with her father and grandfather in the basement filled with fabulous trains. They would always take her favorite, the Lionel Girls Train, with its pink locomotive and pastel freight cars, off the shelf and let her run it around the layout. Her great great grandfather's cast iron and wooden trains and her great uncle's early Standard Gauge were there along with Grand Daddy's boyhood Standard Gauge collection. Another wall of shelves held her father's American Flyer S Gauge trains. As a girl she'd been unimpressed by her friends' little HO scale trains. The track pieces always came apart and the trains were too fragile for children to really play with. She knew what great toy trains were and didn't mind telling her little friends so.
Now all the wonderful trains collected by four generations of her family were hers. As a professional historian she was clearly aware of the cultural history lessons they could teach. As an adjunct professor with a tiny faculty apartment in New York City she knew she didn't have space for the trains. As it was, the tin wind-up trains she'd been collecting herself since high school were overflowing the small space she had to display them. When she set up the new G Gauge set she'd bought to put around the Christmas tree she had to move her table and chairs into the bedroom. Standing in the quiet basement of her grand parent's home, her favorite place on earth, she knew there was only one good solution. "I've got enough trains." thought Mary Tyler, "More than enough." A museum had to be created to make her family's trains available to everyone.
It would be a place where older people could remember their childhood's and children would discover toys they never imagined existed. Families would discover a hobby they could enjoy together. Adolescents could become involved in a creative and challenging interest to carry them through the difficult teenage years. Future generations would come and learn about the lives of past generations. It wouldn't solve the problems of an increasingly complex society, but it could make a dent in them.
The preceding story is fiction, completely imagined, about people who never existed. The story was written as part of the development of the Maine Toy Train Museum. Its purpose is to provide a conceptual framework for the exhibits the Museum will contain. By creating fictional characters (whose lives are the fantasies of every toy train collector) a unifying thread has been spun to tie the Museum's layouts and displays together and to the community.
The Museum's Standard Gauge layout will be in a period room setting, representing Grampa and Grand Ma's West End home during Tucker's childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. The O Gauge layout will be created as Tucker's 1950's adult layout in North Deering, representing his efforts to capture his childhood memories in miniature. Display cases will contain nineteenth century cast iron and wooden trains representing Grampa's childhood toys from the attic on Spring Street, the uncle's early 1900s Standard Gauge electric trains, Payson's 1950s and 1960s American Flyer S Gauge trains and accessories and Mary's wind-up trains. If expansion of the Museum is someday warranted it will be possible to create Payson's 1950's bedroom and playroom with an operating S Gauge layout.
By using a fictional narrative to tell the story of toy trains the Maine Toy Train Museum will be able to present these collectible objects as lessons in cultural history in a coherent and understandable manner. Through creatively presenting the story along with the trains the Museum will be able to directly and indirectly provide the public with a "human element" to identify with - something all too often missing from exhibits of collections of objects. Additionally the story makes it possible to use the toy trains as a tool to educate the public, especially children, about the history of Maine. The story will also provide a touchstone for future development, a reference point to insure that the educational mission of the Museum is not lost or diluted over time.
This original and unique approach to creating a conceptual framework for the development of a toy train museum has not been used before. It will guarantee the Maine Toy Train Museum a leading position among the nation's museums of Americana.
© 1997 reality x publishing co.
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