1,000th Post - More Than A Little Help from My Friends

Welcome to this 1,000th Trackside Treasure post! Something special, something not ever dreamed of or planned. It just sort of happened. Averaging just over one post per week since 2008, the 500th post celebration was back in 2017. But this post isn't about the awesomeness of that, nor about me. I wanted to do something special to appreciatively and exuberantly evince this event. A recent revealing read  (parenthetically and providentially) propelled this post-producer forward propitiously...

“Being happy is surpassed only by the ability to recognize and appreciate that happiness in the moment.”

― Andrew McCarthy, Walking with Sam

Recently, I was inspired to actually read an actual book after I watched lively Lara Spencer interviewing author Andrew McCarthy back in March (below) about his new book Who Needs Friends - An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America. McCarthy was as urbane as Lara was vivacious. I learned that he is not only a former Brat Pack actor, but also a New York Times bestselling author and travel writer for National Geographic Explorer. According to the Who's liner notes, his book "...charts Mccarthy's journey over nearly 10,000 miles behind the wheel...through Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Chihuahuan* Desert and the Rocky Mountains with a driving purpose: to reconnect. Along the way he talks to countless men about their male friendships...turned into a deep explanation of the challenges and rewards that men experience in forming bonds with each other. In McCarthy's own words, "It turns out that a lot of guys have a difficult time with friendship." (*It is my understanding that this desert is not inhabited by tiny, yappy dogs.)

As a fan of road trip books as well as a fan of being cheap, or should I say making the most of our library card, I immediately checked the Kingston Frontenac Public Library website and found that the book was on order. Cool! Reserved! A week later, it was available. Cooler! I read most of the book trackside, finishing !muy rápido! upon notice the book was due and that another library user had reserved it. Good thing I read well under pressure! My review? Well, I would recommend it to a friend!

So what did I take away from the book, an instant New York Times bestseller? That many men may have many friends, but when pressed, there may be just one whom they regard as a true, close friend. The differences between how men relate to other men, and women relate to other women are explored*. McCarthy visits several friends from his early, at times boozy, career with whom he reconnects by phone during his sojourns, in some cases reviving long-forgotten fellowship, chronologically-cast comity, not-quite-gone goodwill. Conversely, he randomly walks up to men in diners or on the sidewalk, even standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona engaging in surprisingly deep discussions to bolster his book's central message. McCarthy's inclusion of a map helped. I'm also a fan of maps. (*Having visited more than one American outlet mall, my observations are that women were in the stores shopping while men were desperately looking for the 'man benches' outside and perhaps desperately trying to avoid one with a fellow man already sitting on it!)

And just how does this relate to Trackside Treasure, my own corner of cyberspace? Blogging here has not been a solo journey, rather it has been like McCarthy's journey one that encompasses a continent, with checkpoints along the way, checking back in and decidedly not being a me-against-the-world voyage of discovery. This blog has led to books, talks, calls, Zooms, visits, get-togethers but always returning to the sofa-and-laptop pop-up shop where what you're reading is produced. And all those led-to things were because of other men (and occasionally women, hello Lesley!).

These are not old friends, as McCarthy's are, some of whom go back to his early days in Hollywood, dare I use the politically- and historically-fraught term The McCarthy Era. Mine are perhaps more like fellow travellers with me on our collective trip through the bounteous blogs in the blogosphere. To mark Trackside Treasure's tenth anniversary, I profiled several men I would not have had the pleasure of communicating with (and meeting some of them) were it not for Trackside Treasure. Four of them also appear in this post - aren't we like old appliances that just keep on going a decade later?

In that vein, may I present to you, on the auspicious occasion of this millesimal milestone, this happy highlight, this climacteric culmination, this festive fête, this way-to-go waypoint of a thousand posts, this merry band of bloggers with whom I feel I have convivially connected, shared cyberspace and dare I say, befriended to various degrees and in various ways. One is like a brother to me, and I have even met three of them! Since I read Who, I have been surreptitiously and serendipitously scavenging while surfing, gathering candid photos of these stalwart sidebar supports that they, my blog partners, posted on their burgeoning blogs. Others gregariously responded to enable this particular presentation - a complete set of happy-place photos! Let's put faces to blogs. Not just headshots or selfies, but real happy-place photos. Here they are in the order I garnered their grins....

Jim of the industrially ingenious JSSX Railway, clearly in his happy place:

Railroader, modeller and White River Division's George Dutka visiting Jim's layout:

Musings on my Model Railroading Addiction's Stephen Gardiner, actually pictured on his wife's blog Cooking with Meegs post-roast with rotisserie turkey last Christmas. Tryptophan time posthaste!

Confessions of a Train Geek's Steve Boyko posted this pose when he was in Stony Beach, SK. He described it aptly, appropriately, for this post as A Happy Place:

30Squares' Jim Lowe in his scale sweet spot - the most-creative several square feet in Canada. Jim describes this scene thus - "The view from my drafting table where a lot of my modelmaking gets done. The table’s surface shows up quite frequently in my blog’s photos, so one gets the complete scene in this picture. That’s the Lunar Module HO-9 micro-layout over my shoulder, and the Centennial Experimental Farm layout - also in HO-9 - is beside it. On the table I’m getting ready to install the ‘glass’ in the old AHM #5815 Repair Shop kit that I’m currently building."

Michael Hammond of The Beachburg Sub backed by the forest behind his Dad's old house in Petrolia, ON in 2021 - a little slice of paradise! Michael recently published a post in a similar vein to this one, about his blogging influences and journey so far!

Chris Mears of Prince Street prestige perusing one of his [international!] friend James Hilton's works. Eliciting eclectic interests and always ready to capture moments that bring him satisfaction - prototype or model - core competency! Key Princeformance Indicator!

Waaaay back on February 9, 2012, Chris blogged: 

"I’ve been picking away at this blog for a couple of years now. I feel so lucky to have made some great friendships and to have been able to use the blog as a common place to think about ideas online. I love railroading and I’m especially fond of things like urban railroading, everything GO Transit and of course the Prince Edward Island Railway. Recently I posted some musings about VIA yard ops. Tonight Eric Gagnon left a really excellent comment on that VIA post. His insight was just too great to leave buried in the comments reel. I think it’s worth a post of its own so everyone can see it. I tell you what I am going to do – I’m going to dig out Eric’s book and start mapping out some of those consists.Thanks Eric. Thanks for reminding me again how great this hobby is."

I found the above not via deep-dive research. I simply typed the word 'friend' into Chris' Prince Street blog search box and fully forty pages of 'friend' posts popped up. That's five posts per page for a total of over 200 blog posts in which the word 'friend' appears. Just one indication of how gregarious this field of interest, and practitioners of it like Chris, can be. (Imagine if he was named Greg, that would be really Gregarious! He is interested in many areas, I know, so could they be called Greg-areas? If...) But I digress. The real nugget here is that was 14 years ago, and that our eclectic email banter goes back at least 15 years!

Matthieu Lachance having Hedley Junction joy in this view visiting in Villeneuve with the relics:

Marc Simpson recently left us and I am fortunate to have had the chance to meet him at Real Rails 2025 in Burlington (pictured).  His Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale blog lives on as a wide seam of masterful modelling; a mine of rock-solid research. Mark also facilitated my RMMBC presentations and was great to work with.

Here's Dave with my son and Dad recreating the perilous 1996 burger snatch three years later while trainwatching at Morningstar Road west of Trenton. Backing up a bit, the actual near-devouring of Dave's burger occurred during Quinte '96 railfanning while driving through Trenton, therefore no photos were taken to preserve it at the time. After picking up lunch at Wendy's in Trenton, my son Andrew removed a burger from the bag and unwittingly unwrapped, and almost bit into, his uncle's burger by mistake. Nooooo! Dave's spring-loaded hand was out like a shot to reclaim his still-hot and unsampled sandwich. Here we are preserving history, with pickles!

Speaking of past decades, while researching this post I stumbled on what appears to be Bill Staiger's first comment (below) back in 2016. Bill is a loyal Trackside Treasure reader from Delaware, and a frequent suggester of topics that I must admit I have been terrible at following up. Bill is also an inveterate train rider and collegial correspondent!

I want to thank all these friends for their time and interest, efforts and energy sharing their blogs and their journeys as part of my ongoing journey through the life and topics of Trackside Treasure!

Without them, my existence herein would be a lesser one.

--Eric

Here I am in my happy place - images about 40 years apart. Trackside. Treasure-troving. Thanks to Randy O'Brien's handiwork, my Dad's original photo, while updated, keeps its original 1976 downed mittens in the snow!

But...full disclosure. Here's my real happy place - this past Easter! Ensconced in home and family.

Thanks for being along on this ride, whether it's for one post or all one thousand. You are welcome here on Trackside Treasure and should feel welcome to make this one of your happy places. Actually, I hope you will find many such places here. I want to keep Trackside Treasure a friendly place where friends are able to share model and prototype railroading 1000 per cent of the time in over 1000 published posts. Now, on to 1001!

(reformatted online auction site photo)

Running extra...

• Androscoggin on my noggin. Here's a model railway YouTube creator who takes time to assemble accurate-looking freight consists - the A&WM Railway.
• Just the facts, ma'am. Facts GO ALTO new website with...facts on the project?

Then things got weird. Rapido TTC Gloucester subway pulls into Kingston station. Blew right through Kennedy and kept going. Mind the reality gap!

Speaking of satire, Stephen Colbert just aired his last Late Show. As a longtime consumer of late night television thru Johnny, Dave, Jay and Stephen, and now Jimmy (and Guillermo). Canadians are funnier than Americans. Why? Because we continued the British tradition of taking the p**s. Though it's often thought that Stephen was born in the States, he was actually found floating in a basket in the bullrushes lining the St Lawrence River near Cornwall. He may be Canadian, American or Mohawk.

First past the post...

Speaking of satiric model railroad companies, the recently-announced 'Rapido: The Next Generation' program is not just platonic promises. My young grandson's complimentary boxcar arrived after just a couple of days via courier. What a positive way to keep the hobby on track!