Thomasburg travelogue Visiting Tom Burg’s O scale Utopia & Infinity RR/Dave Rickaby and Tom Burg
PHOTOS BY DAVE RICKABY I
t’s September of 1955; the place is Thomasburg, U.S.A. This is the kind of city that I thought would have been cast in that gritty, urban kind of perfection. My expectations of hectic comings and goings, people hurrying to and fro, hustle and bustle, noise and chaos, were greeted with a sanguine serendipity of order and calm. I was hop- ing my first taste of the air here would imbue a flavor of an industrial cuisine, a combination of oil, grease, smoke, dust, diesel exhaust fumes and ozone from passing electric trains, along with the smells of ethnic cooking from the local eateries, a seven-course meal for this traveler’s palate. Instead, the air was crisp and clean, and the skies were bluer than blue. The people were peaceful and seemingly happy, and there was a com- mon pride about the town. Everyone knew their place in life and business and went about them seamlessly. Everything seemed perfect, eerily utopian. This was my first impression of the town as I stepped onto the platform of the Utopia & Infinity Railway’s new passenger station. Within minutes the Mercury, the fastest electric-powered 40
A busy Utopia & Infinity GE 44-tonner No. 44 spreads its time between moving cars to Damon Yard (above) and servicing various industries around Thomasburg. No. 44 (top) is pulling a DSS&A boxcar from a freight house on the north side of town.
passenger train on the schedule, sped off into the distance with just a tinge of the smell of ozone in the air. (All nine of the line’s passenger trains have been
named for the planets.) I have come here to attend a conference of the Association of American Railroads, which is being hosted by the Utopia & FEBRUARY 2012
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