JOE FOTHERGILL
“I’ve always liked trains, since I was a kid growing up in Toronto. We lived close to a railroad track, and all during the war, you could hear the switchers shunting back and forth at night when you were trying to sleep, and the whistles would be blowing all the time. But it didn’t bother me; I liked the trains.
“When I was about 10, I used to go over to the local station, the Danforth station, and stand on the platform and watch them go by. And when you’re a young fellow, to see them going by with six-foot wheels on them, that’s pretty awesome.
“I eventually started out with HO trains, the little electric ones. But I always wanted to make a steam engine. I read an article in Popular Mechanics when I was in Grade 7, and it described what it was like to drive a model steam train — the noise, the smells — and ever since then I thought, ‘I want to make a model steam engine.’ That was it.
“I always wanted to do it but never got around to it. But much later in life — 35 years ago — I was sick with pancreatitis and I was in the hospital. I was laying there with tubes sticking out all over and not moving, and when things started looking better I thought, ‘What the heck am I waiting for? I’m going to get at this.’ So I did.
“I went off to Hamilton to get a kit for a small Juliet, a 35-pound thing. It took me two and a half years or so to make that thing. And it ran really well.
“So then I thought I needed a bigger one, so I got a Pacific kit; much bigger, but the same threeand-a-half-inch gauge. It weighed 115 pounds when it was finished. And it ran very well.
“Then I joined this club (Ottawa Valley Live Steamers and Model Engineers) and I’ve been running and building ever since. I’ve built eight of them … well, you could say seven, but one of them I built twice.
“I’m 83 now, and the Popular Mechanics article was right. I have a lot of fun driving. Besides the fact of having made it and having it work, it hauls your butt around the track, and they’re fun to run. You’ve got something to do; you have to keep the fire up, watch the water level, make sure the brakes are working. When you load it down and start uphill, it chuffs a little harder, and it sounds great.”