>>1933811Not 100% certain, but I think it was because when I was a kid my parents would buy me a cheap Bachman HO scale train set every other Christmas like pic related. It was extremely cheap and meant as an introductory train set, containing a bunch of track you could make into an oval or whatever, a locomotive, rolling stock and usually some other stuff like tiny plastic people or telephone poles.
I loved them and would set them up each year, but as time went on I grew my model railroad by designing little landscapes by bringing in dirt, rocks, plants and stuff. Eventually my parents started buying me extra things like little buildings, lights, new train cars or locomotives and other junk to decorate the model with.
From there the train autism was born and I would start to watch trains that would go by from our apartment window or they'd take me to go wander around the train yard in this small town (which was pretty fucking dangerous in retrospect, but nobody thought like that in the 90s). I also secretly subscribed to a few train magazines and got all these cool train things to read before my parents started getting invoices in the mail and were like what. I would go to the library as well or watch old VHS tapes I got on trains.
Now I'm just a person who likes trains and has spent a lifetime learning about them, but I have no involvement in the industry or anything. I still fuckin' love trains so I still read about them, watch them all the time, take rides (even on freight trains...got to do some epic train hopping across the Rocky Mountains in Canada in the past) and own a lot of shares in publicly traded railroad companies to support the industry I love. Thanks for reading my blog post.
