Dolton Junction number 3, an Athearn SW7, was my first serious effort at building a decent model. I was sixteen at the time, which puts it at almost five decades old. Note the faded lettering on the grill and the custom logo.
Time, and our recollection of it, is a funny thing. I’ll be 65 this summer. I imagine like many my age, you find yourself in periods of reflection more often. It’s during those periods of reviewing the past that time seems almost elastic. What we remember and what we don’t, seems so bizarrely arbitrary. Why do we remember some distant events with such precision (or at least we think we do), and other, often very long periods, just don’t conjure much up?
For reasons I haven’t fully processed, the model above stirs up some hard-to-define emotions. It’s amazing to me that I was able to build something of this quality at the age of sixteen. Many decades passed afterward before I could get back to this skill level. I’d even go so far as to say that if I tried to replicate it now, a full five decades later, the end result would be about the same. I have such vivid memories of how it came to be and the process of building it (said from the person who can’t find his car keys).
We lived in the South Pacific (Guam to be precise) during my teenage years in the 1970s. This was still the golden age of hobby stores and there was a pretty darn good one in Tamuning, Guam. I remember going there one afternoon. The day had started with me having no interest in model railroading. I walked into the store, was drawn to the magazine rack, and a switch clicked. I went from zero to full immersion in the hobby just like that. Weird. I imagine others have had similar experiences.
I became an avid rail magazine reader and started building models. The results were what you’d expect from a sixteen year old newbie, not ready for primetime to say the least. Ouch, they were rough.
We returned to Indiana for my last two years of high school. There was another well-stocked hobby store in Bloomington and it wasn’t long before I was at the magazine rack. I picked up the December issue of Railroad Modeler. Inside was my hobby game-changing article, a piece on the LAJ by the legendary Don Simms. I couldn’t put it down, reading it over and over. Inspired by the article, I decided to build myself a freelance switching layout similar to the LAJ but called The Dolton Junction (based in Chicago). I remember drawing up a track plan but have no memory of what it looked like. I do know the layout was never built.
Here’s the weird part about memory. I recall so vividly making the decision that I would build an LAJ-like switcher that wasn’t a soap carving. Total focus and concentration. I recall getting the detail parts mail order. I recall getting in touch with Rail Graphics, sending them the freelance logo, and having custom decals made. I recall the owner (I believe his name was Ron) sending me a friendly note saying the lines on my initial drawing were too thin and asking if I could redo it. I recall getting into a total “zone” from start to finish building the model. It’s still astounding to me that I pulled something like that off at age sixteen given it would take a lot of work for me to replicate that degree of finish even now.
Getting back to the subject of time, it’s sort of a weird melancholy feeling to look back on the life of fifty years that have elapsed since then, the changes in the hobby and the world. I could never have guessed that five decades later I would still be holding that same model in my hands. Five decades later I finally have that LAJ layout and am still fascinated by the line.
The Dolton Junction switcher is in surprisingly good shape but has some minor damage. My fun project of the month will be carefully restoring it. I wonder if it even runs. I pulled the shell off and there isn’t a hint of rust on it. Stay tuned.