As I laid in bed and slowly turned the dial on my transistor radio, the unmistakable sound of a steam locomotive whistle caught my attention. Living only a block from the Elberon train station on the New York & Long Branch Railroad, I was used to hearing trains as I drifted off to sleep, but they were always diesel-powered. E7's and E8's handled the Pennsy commuter trains, while the Jersey Central ran with brand new GP40P's. What little freight there was was handled by a CNJ RS3, but that usually operated in the early afternoon. What I was hearing was definitely a steam locomotive whistle, and it was coming from my radio! I had stumbled upon the last few minutes of the Jean Shepherd radio show on WOR in New York City. Things would never quite be the same. As a young teenager (I was about 14 at the time), I used to enjoy listening to the radio at night and trying to pick up far away stations. There was a rock-n' roll station out of Buffalo that I used to listen to and, depending upon the weather conditions, I could also tune in stations from the south and the Midwest. It was on one of these trips up and down the dial that I "discovered" Shepherd. Captivated by hearing someone playing train recordings on the radio, the next night I again fumbled with the radio dial in the dark as I went in search of the distinctive voice that had woven a tale of railroading the night before. I don't remember what the subject of that night's show was, but it must have been interesting as I found myself voluntarily heading off to bed and tuning in nightly to hear Jean Shepherd give his take on the world and spin tales of mythical proportions of his childhood in the steel mill town of Hammond, Indiana, or his experiences in the Army Signal Corps. For those who do not recognize the name Jean Shepherd, you may, perhaps, be familiar with the movie, A Christmas Story which is broadcast over and over on television during the holiday season. Written and narrated by Shepherd, this film features snippets from a number of his short stories, and although the movie is less than 20 years old, it is already considered a classic. A master story teller, Shepherd has been described as the Mark Twain of our times. He was a prolific writer who authored four volumes of short stories: In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash; Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters; The Ferrari in the Bedroom; and A Fistful of Fig Newtons; as well as dozens of stories for a variety of magazines ranging from Car and Driver to Playboy. Additionally, he appeared as an actor on Broadway, wrote a series of television productions for PBS-The Phantom of the Open Hearth; The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters; Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss; and The Star Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski- and had two television series on PBS in the 1970's. He also made countless appearances on stages and college campuses all across the country where he elevated storytelling to an art form. He was a regular at Princeton University, where appeared annually for more than 30 years. He also performed at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall and, during the 1960's, did live broadcasts from the famous Limelight Club in New York City's Greenwich Village. However, it was his radio show that gained Shepherd, who died late last year at the age of 78, his biggest audience. What does all of this have to do with model railroading? Well, on a personal level, I've always associated listening to Jean Shepherd with trains, and on a general level, I've always been amazed at the number of modelers and railfans that I have run into who are also Shepherd fans. Perhaps it's because he captured with words so well some of the same scenes and feelings that we, as modelers, try to build into our layouts, or as railfans try to capture in our photographs. Or, maybe it was just the feeling of solidarity that he provided as his deep, Midwestern voice came through the radio at night with humorous stories and comments on the world around us. I can recall as a teenager working on various modeling projects while "Shep" kept me company- expounding on events of the day or telling stories of his Depression-era youth-and I can also remember returning from all day railfan adventures with my friend Chuck Killian and listening late at night to Shepherd as we drove the final miles home. Maybe it is because of the relatively solitary nature of our hobby that many other east coast modelers have similar memories of tuning into Shep. Jean Shepherd's stories helped to fuel my interest in the railroads that crisscrossed the heavily industrialized corner of northwestern Indiana. Passing an eastbound interurban that has just left the station, a CSS&SB Little Joe (above) runs along the alleyways of Hammond as it heads a freight towards Gary. Many a Shepherd story had he and his friends walking through these alleys. The gritty mills and refineries in the Hammond area make great backgrounds for railroad photography and are also great modeling subjects (right). One of the highlights of my first cross country train trip as a teenager in 1975 was passing through Hammond, Indiana, where Shepherd had grown up, and seeing the town that he so often described with its steel mills and oil refineries. On later trips I took some time to check out the railroad action in Hammond for myself. All the while those marvelous Jean Shepherd stories played through the back of mind. Laced with railroad tracks, the mills and refineries on the shore of Lake Michigan looked just as he had described them. Not catching onto it until the early 1970's, I was a relative late comer to the show, which had been running on WOR since 1956. However, I was instantly captivated and I rarely missed it. Each night, for 45 minutes, Shep would weave a tale on some subject, often digressing into other humorous stories or presenting a mixture of comments - usually sarcastic in nature on current events. Along the way he'd mix in some silliness (songs like The Bear Missed the Train, and The Sheik Of Araby sung and played on the kazoo) and then, just before the show was up, he'd return to his original theme, tie everything together, and finish out the show. Noted media critic Marshall McLuhan, described Shepherd as the "first radio novelist," and New York Daily News columnist David Hinckley wrote in a recent tribute to Shepherd, "To say Jean Shepherd told stories, is like saying Fred Astaire danced. Accurate, but incomplete." When I got a job that interfered with my listening to the show, I devised a way to automatically tape it so that I could listen to it when I got home. This went on until1977, when WOR changed its format and the show went off the air. Unfortunately, being a teenager of very limited means, I would usually record the current show over the tape of the previous night's show. So, when Shepherd went off the air, I had only a few tapes of old shows to fill the void. When I came to work at Carstens in 1981, I quickly found out that Bill Schaumburg and Jim Boyd were Shepherd fans. Jim Ankrom was a fan of his books, and frequent contributors Don Spiro and Walt Lankenau, as well as ad salesman Pete Uptegrove all grew up listening to Shep and were fans. So was Bob Mohowski, and it turned out, so was a good friend of his, John Treen. In the mid-1980's my wife and my son and I ran into them at an outdoor show that Shepherd was doing in Clinton, New Jersey. John was a long time employee of the New York, Susquehanna & Western who loved railroading. One day, not long before he passed away, John stopped by the office while on his way to Pennsylvania for a few days of railfanning and presented me with a box full of old reel-to-reel tapes and a few cassettes of Shepherd shows. It seemed that he, too, didn't like to miss Shep's radio show when he was working. Unfortunately, it turned out that many of the tapes had deteriorated from age, but there were a few gems among them, including one of Shepherd riding one of the last runs of the City of Los Angeles. My small tape collection grew in size and quality in the mid-1980's when Dorsett Books offered cassette tapes of Shepherd reading some of his short stories. All together they put out seven tapes, which held ten stories. Around the same time, the Book of the Month Club offered a tape of Shepherd reading Robert Service poetry. Another addition was made to my modest library of Shepherd tapes and a new tradition was soon born. While coming back from a trip to the Strasburg Railroad with my boys, I popped in one of the tapes and, as we drove home through the darkness, we listened spellbound as Shepherd weaved a tale as only he could. Thus, started the ritual of listening to Jean Shepherd tapes on family trip in the car. (If you like a good story, see if you can locate any of the Dorsett Books tapes. These were made before books on audio became all of the rage, and are not easy to find. However, if you check the Internet there are some out there and they are well worth the search.) For anyone with Internet access, there are a couple websites dedicated to Shepherd's work (bobkaye.com/Shep.html and www.advanix.net/~jsadur/shep.htm). There is also one featuring audio clips of Shepherd telling a variety of short stories (www.mpxreview.coml jeanshepherd) and another that lists hundreds of tapes of his old radio shows for sale (www.advanix.net I -jsadur I shepcat.htm). Among these are some that deal with railroads. Having been raised in the 1930's and 40's in an industrial area just outside of Chicago, Shepherd was quite familiar with railroads and they often played a part in his stories. While he was not a railfan, and was sometimes a little hazy on the details that railfans seem to think are so important, the stories he told about trains were always entertaining - whether it was his ride on the City of Los Angeles, a show on steam whistles, troop train anecdotes, or the time he recounted some of the railroad accidents he had witnessed. Almost thirty years after I first heard Shepherd, I still find that listening to old tapes of him as I'm driving in the car, or working in the basement on a modeling project, to be an enjoyable experience. Whether you're old Shepherd fan yearning for a classic tale, or if you've never had the pleasure of being acquainted with his material, check out one of these web sites, or better yet, read In God We Trust, All Other Pay Cash, or Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, and pick up a few tapes to listen to as you work on your latest modeling project. I'm sure that you'll enjoy them. The world as Jean Shepherd saw it was a fascinating place.