I came home from the hospital 3 days after I was born and became hooked on trains almost instantly. Our house was next to the now gone Toledo Terminal RR branch that ran from Rossford, Oh to Glanzman Rd in Toledo. There was a bridge (Named the Upper River bridge) that eventually was removed a few years ago, it had deteriorated to the point it was a safety hazard. My poor mother was driven to a breakdown due to two things, first, I was a nightowl from day one, I wanted to sleep all day and stay up all night. Her second problem was the trains. She would try every trick that she knew to get me to fall asleep and just as she thought she got me out, here comes a train. She couldn't hear them like I could, and I would babble "Tain!", and she would try to convince me, "No honey, there's no train!", but soon, she would hear it and she said after about a year and a half of that, she felt like she was going to die. One day, they took her in an ambulance to the hospital for exhaustion. It's one of my earliest memories. She solved the problem simply by telling me to call my dad when I needed something, and she was able to finally sleep. I wish I could have. Every morning, I wanted to sleep, but had to get up for school or whatever, and it was a nightmare. I was sick all the time.
I'm an old man now, but still watch trains, in person, and online. I subbed to Virtual Railfan pretty soon after it went online, and I go to the rail park in Holland, Oh a couple of times a week to watch the NS Chicago line. I liked it better when it was Conrail. I used to take my dogs with me, and a couple of them really loved going there. My dog Gus, gone over 25 years now, would be pretty steamed when we didn't go for whatever reason. Starting about 2am on my nights off work, he would have a hair trigger, all I needed to do was creak my chair and he would be on his feet. If I told him, "No, we're staying home!", dirty looks and a lot of sighing would happen. Like this, the wrinkles on his forehead were the tell he wasn't happy with me. And all the sighing.
All I needed to do to make him happy was say, "Ok, choo-choos!", and he would start bouncing off the walls. A lot of the train crews knew him by name, and he was kind of a local celebrity, due to his abilty to eat a large ice cream cone in one shot. He got a lot of free ice cream over his 14+ years by doing that trick. Stick the whole thing into his mouth, ice cream end first, and he would get it down, with almost no drips. That big head was good for more than just chewing on stuff. If I could bring one of my dogs back to life, it would be him, housebreaking and chewing stuff up and all his many fears(he was scared of almost everything), he was my favorite of them all.
