(Click on the pictures below to obtain larger images, which take longer to download.) Photographs © George P. Landow may be copied without written permission for any noncommercial use — for hobbies, education, and so on. If you have any additional information on the locomotives or rolling stock in these pictures, please feel free to send it along to me at george@landow.com; pictures are welcome, too. GPL)
These 12 photographs, some of the earliest I ever made, date from winter 1950, when I was ten years old. My father, H. I. Landow M. D. — "Hi" to social acquaintances and "Doc" to his children — settled in the upper Bronx near Montefiore Hospital after World War II after he came out of the Navy. In 1950 he decided he wanted to leave his New York medical practice and become a country doctor, and so he did, moving us to Dover Plains, New York, then a town of about 800 people. I believe these photos date from the first day I saw what would be our new home (though we didn't move up until the summer, I'm sure). About this time I also received an American Flyer S-gauge 4-6-4 Hudson, and looking at these pictures reminds me what a monster the real Hudson was!
The water tower, which I don't remember at all, and the town railroad station and freight house, which I do, largely for two reasons. First, I made fairly frequent trips on this, the Harlem Valley line of the New York Central, to New York to see my orthodontist. Second, the station master in charge made it memorable: Mr. Kozlaryk, an elderly widower lived across the street from us on Reimer Avenue, one of the few streets in town (I can remember only 3). A real chess player who played by mail, receiving postcards from all around the country and world, he taught me to play the game, and I still remember the lovely smell of the beautiful wooden chess pieces when he took then out of the box and placed them on the board. An amateur astronomer, he had an enormous portable telescope on a large wooden tripod that had a motor to follow the stars. One clear summer nights, he would set it up on his front lawn and show any neighborhood children who were interested the moon, multiple stars, and constellations.
The engine at rest.
Pulling away — going, going, gone.
