Welcome to Toonerville’s Mountain Station atop lovely, snowy Church Mountain. The Snowball Express is just pulling out.
I believe I may have mentioned in recent posts that part of the joy of cleaning the garage after a long illness left it in a nightmare shambles of boxes and old toys and stuff we really need to throw out, is that I found the boxes with the remnants of my old HO model train layout. Now I am busy rescuing, repairing, and photographing the pieces of Toonerville that I have dug out of the trash piles.
In the picture from Mountain Station, you see the billboard boxcar and the old caboose I managed to pluck out of one of the boxes that heavy stuff had been tossed on top of.
Smokey Joe, the engine number 99, is pulling the 1890’s Pullman passenger car and mail car that will soon pull into Mountain Station.
The two Pullman train cars that I rescued from the same box as the billboard boxcar are both built from kits back when I was in college and had my train set in the basement at home in Iowa.
You may have noticed the mysterious mansion up the mountainside from the Methodist Church that gives the mountain its name. No one knows for sure what the two weird, big-nosed men currently living up there are up to, but lately there has been a lot of barking filling the air. The lights are on in the mansion currently. Maybe someone brave should go up there and investigate.
Here’s a better look at the side of the Pullman Passenger car as it zooms past the church.
The Super Chief is pulling its passenger observation car and its gondola car toward the station also. Santa Fe’s finest passenger service also goes fast.
I bought the Super Chief engine at a train show in San Antonio in the middle 90’s. The passenger cars I have had since I was in high school, circa 1974.
The F-9 diesel freight hauler is pulling a lumber car and the old caboose.
The blue F-9 is the same kind of engine as the Super Chief. It was originally part of the set my father bought for himself when he retired. He intended to build a layout in the basement at the farmhouse when he moved back to Iowa. He finally gave it up, though, and gave it to my sons and me as a gift. I found it in the box in the garage. It looks like it probably still runs. The Union Carbide lumber car was on the back porch in the mess left behind when my father-in-law’s house burned down and he piled the salvaged stuff there. It was in a box with old salvaged kitchen goods that managed not to burn. It still needs serious cleaning. My caboose is missing its back wheels and the trucks the wheels ride on is broken.
Cruella DeVille’s roadster was spotted near the mysterious old mansion. It is very possible something bad is going on up there.
Of all the many things I have to get done before I schlepp off this mortal coil stage right, rescuing my HO rolling stock is probably not the most important, but it is definitely one of the most satisfying.
The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.
Catch a Falling Star 
The View From My Little Town
An aerial view of Toonerville in Winter
As immigration officers round up school children and their families blocks from a school in North Carolina, Trump minion Flynn is being accused of violating the Logan Act over discussions with the Russians before Trump took office, and DeVos is being chased away from a Washington middle school by angry protesters who don’t want her sucking the intelligence out the students, I am reminded there are quieter places to go and get away from all the insane noise that is trying to kill us. Thus I head back to Toonerville, my HO scale model train town that has been packed away since we moved to Dallas in 2004. I have laid the downtown and part of the residential area out on a snowfield on the spare bed in my bedroom.
I am reminded, as I revisit Toonerville (with the Toonerville Trolley waiting down front from the train station), that I am a humor writer that writes about small town experiences and the teaching of children. I am imaginative and creative, and I have working strategies for dealing with the stress and insanity caused by all the political baboons doing the politically-charged things that political baboons do baboonishly every baboon day. There are places to go to get away from the Trump Circus’s endless monkey-house of horror.
In Toonerville, none of the clocks keep the correct time and none of them agree what time it is. Certain things are timeless. The village works together to solve its problems. What the wits and twits who chew Red Man tobacco down at Al’s General Store think about politics never leaves the checkerboards in front of the fire place. Mayor Moosewinkle at City Hall has no plans to run for State or Federal office. (Thank God for that, he’s a nut.) And officer Billy Bob Wortle, formerly from Texas, has never shot anybody of any color. The County Sheriff doesn’t even trust him to own bullets for that big old gun of his. As far as executive orders from Washington go, we mostly don’t give a damn.
Down at the Post Office, Mr. Murdoch the postman has never “gone postal” and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He loves to gossip, though. And Mr. Santucci, the hot-headed Italian owner-operator of the Farmer’s Market (who looks just like Santa Claus in the Coke ads, but is one very foul-mouthed Santa at Christmas time) secretly believes that it is the many differences between the various residents of town that keep life interesting. And old Ben Johnson, the town’s only black man, is his very best friend.
It’s a truly good feeling to live in a small town where all the people bicker and throw fits, but no one would every want to throw anyone out of town. People belong together, working for the common good. And it is a rather sad thing if the only place such a town can exist is inside my goofy old head. But if we bicker a little less and throw fits less often on the inside, won’t we be better people on the outside too?
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