Bill Solomon

It’s timeless – boys love trains.  You imagine being an engineer racing across the country through towns and farms.  

When I was 7-years-old, my grandfather bought me a Lionel Santa Fe electric train set.  It had two engines, a coal car, an oil tanker, a cattle car that actually moved the cattle off the train, and a few other cars including a caboose.  A teen-age boy in the neighborhood set the train up on a ping-pong table and wired it ready to go. It was the place I would spend hours of enjoyment by myself or with friends racing the trains and imagining many adventures.

As I grew up and discovered sports, the train set sat in the basement collecting dust-- but still ready for me to come down and run it around the tracks. Then my parents moved when I was 15, and the train set was boxed up and stored away. Those boxes eventually moved with my wife and me and our two daughters to a house that gathered more memories, more stuff and more boxes.

Push it forward another 30 years, and it was time to downsize to a ranch house with no basement. And it was time to purge.  My wife said it was finally time to get rid of those untouched boxes of trains, and I begrudgingly agreed to sell the set.

I did some homework and found a willing buyer in a local train shop.  We loaded the set into the car, delivered it, collected a little money and said good-bye.  Driving away, I had such a heavy feeling.  I felt like I had abandoned the memories of my grandfather in that box. I was heartbroken.  I realized for the first time what that train truly meant to me.

The next day I called the storeowner to see if I could buy back my train.  I was ready to pay more than I received just to have it again. The man could not have been nicer. When I told him my story, he totally understood.  I drove back to get my train, and he just asked me to give back what he gave me.

Now I keep the engine on my office desk. I look at it every day and think of a lucky young boy and the great memory of his grandfather.