Model Railroad History 1949-1963

DENNIS GRIGASSY’S MODEL RAILROADING HISTORY – 1949 - 1963

I received my first electric train, a Lionel set, at Christmas 1949 when I was 8½ years old. It had the 2025 locomotive, the operating milk car, the Sunoco tank car, and a caboose. There were some pictures of it in some old home-movies, but they have been lost.

Around that time my dad also gave me two fairly complete sets of older Lionel trains that he had had as a boy. I’m sad and ashamed to say that, as a precocious young lad these now-collectors-items were pretty much destroyed with childhood pranks, mostly involving “cherry bomb” firecrackers.

During the early ‘50’s I added to the Lionel set with a few more cars, a lot more track, a couple of locomotives that I traded a bunch of “worthless” baseball cards for with some guys in my Boy Scout troop who thought I was nuts to be playing with trains at my age. I never built a real layout though, just had the trains set up on the floor of my room.

Moving ahead to 1957-1963, and maturing quite a bit, here are some pictures of my first real room-sized HO layout; built in the third-floor game room while I lived at home with my parents.