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BY BRUCE KELLY/PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR I


WAS BORN IN MONTANA AND pre- schooled in Washington, but by the time I turned 21, California was


practically all I had ever known. A cou- ple years outside Los Angeles in Thou- sand Oaks, a couple more way up north in Novato, then finally we settled down south of L.A. in El Toro, within sight and sound of something I would even- tually come to know as the Surf Line. My earliest recollection of seeing a real live train was that day, sometime in the mid-1970s, when I looked out my parent’s


upstairs northward bedroom across empty land


window, that


would later become part of the subur- ban sprawl, and there it was — a Santa Fe freight, stretching as far as the eye could see, rolling past strawberry and tomato fields on its way into El Toro. At some point, my cousin Billy pre-


28 FEBRUARY 2014 • RAILFAN.COM sented several boxfuls of HO scale


trains that soon wound up on a 4×8 sheet of plywood in my bedroom. Part- time jobs funded the ongoing expansion of my tiny rail empire, including an Amtrak SDP40F in “bloody nose” with pointless arrow, just like the ones that blew through El Toro at 90 m.p.h. One day, I was riding my bike through town and noticed two adjacent houses with their garage doors open, grown men standing inside, and model trains winding their way through incredibly realistic landscapes. Master modelers Larry Stuart, Dave Hussey, Dick Harley, and Ed Ryan welcomed this long-haired kid into their circle, and taught me the finer points of weather- ing, detailing, scenery, and the like. Serrano


Intermediate School sat right against the Surf Line, so many a


recess was spent near the chain link fence in hopes of seeing an Amtrak San Diegan or Santa Fe freight go by. After entering El Toro High School, I jetti- soned the model trains and began “fo- cusing” on real trains. Several years earlier, my dad had given me the old Argus C3 35mm camera that his dad once gave to him. With that small, rugged box camera I exposed my earli- est train pictures, going back to Union Pacific DD35s in the desert, Southern Pacific U50s and DD35B’s in storage in Los Angeles, and a ride in steam-heated dome cars on the Coast Starlight. “Growing Up With Trains” more or less described my youthful years in southern California. It’s also the title of a book authored by Richard Stein- heimer and Donald Sims, which came out in 1982, a year after I finished high


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