For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for May 25, 2019

definitely a train

Call his cell phone! Oh! wait; this is 20 years ago.

Oh this could end up costing even more than the sports car.

If the children get involved with it and help Dad out, it might be worth all the money and trouble.

Actually, running trains got tiring kinda quickly for me. Building the layouts is the best part!

Rush hour traffic it is!!

important to cherish your childlike sense of fun and fancy

I am thinking it would be a cool new toy. Maybe even the kids could play with it.

Union Pacific , i would have thought it would have been Canadian Pacific.

John’s inner child has taken over!

Hope he doesn’t go off the rails on this new hobby!

One of my BILs is a toy train nut. Even has a “train” mailbox.

Boys and their toys….

He likes the vintage trains I see… Union Pacific (in Canada no less), running an “F series” locomotive of some sort. ;-)

My husband has collected 1:64 cars since he was about 6 years old. He still has almost all of his originals & keeps collecting. He has a little town that he built to display them (he cycles a lot of them). He also collects police cars and “Hollywood” cars. His town is like a train layout…just without the train.

My first husband had O gauge -from when he was a kid in the early 1940s….and he had been a bachelor for a very long time. He had his apartment rigged up with holes in the walls so the trains could run from room to room….. Then one day we were burglarized. Guess what they took? And ONLY the trains… it was the start of my husband’s demise that eventually killed him at age 55 with a heart attack. He never got over that loss.

Which one of them has the dynamite plunger?

My dentist office has a whole train system set up in his entry, and it goes all through the entire office up near the ceiling. There are tunnels in the walls between rooms, so as you sit in the dentist chair, hands with a death grip on the chair arms, mouth open, drill motor humming in your ear…. you can wait for the train to go buy.

Our small town hardware store had a good sized train set running under the ceiling, all around his store. It had a specially made, see through plastic domed tunnel made over the front door on the street side, so you could watch it come out. Inside, there was a beautiful Thomas The Train table set up for the kiddies to play with. Of course the store sold all the merchandise for your own set up. This was 20 years ago when Thomas was new and not sold everywhere as it is now. The store carried plenty of model RR train stuff to keep everyone happy. Lots of plastic car model kits to chose from too. Great store. Gone now.

My grandchildren’s mother’s father, had a large enough train for all his 9 kids to ride on (not all at once)…in the house! She said he would set it up through as many rooms as he had track for, mostly at Christmas time. Now one of her brother’s has it.

Passenger trains did not have a caboose. It was the conductor’s office where he did the cargo paper work. Passenger conductors only had to check and punch the passenger’s tickets.

Some trains were mixed, ie freight and passenger thus a caboose. Union Pacific was yellow, not red! I tried to set up an HO display years ago, but after forking out $20 for locos that would work only for a week before the axles spun out, scrapped it. Best memories of railroading: 1948 Oriental Limited: a scream from the women’s restroom – women hastily exiting – and the smell of skunk wafting through the car! (Someone flushed as a skunk got run over) 1948 – Chicago Railroad Fair 1957: The Great Dome Empire Builder 1957: Chicago to Buffalo, NY on a drovers pass 1965: Canadian – on at Winnipeg and met a girl – that got off at next stop!

Good luck preventing your brats from breaking if you bring it home!

He’s found his other joy.

This was one of best story of this comic I Love trains

I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve been training.

The beginning of John’s decades-long miniature train hobby…

Is his middle name “Sheldon”?

So Mrs. Patterson, where is your fatter son?

very nice but you should of painted the locomotive Armour Yellow instead of red

John lost track of time.

This shopkeeper is like John’s dealer.