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WELCOME to "Grampy's Train Room"

my name is Stephen Doughty Sr. I have two grandsons Victor and Austin and I'm a train-a-holic.

I have always loved trains,as a toddler I would stand at the kitchen window and watch the Boston & Maine or Maine Central freight and passenger trains fly by 60 feet from the house. As they passed the whole house would shake and you could clearly see the faces of passengers. It was the 50's a decade in which passenger service would disappear from the rails, yet even today, freight lashups roll over those same tracks servicing paper mills in South Brewer and Bucksport.

Before I was born my blood was spiked with a love of the "iron road" my maternal grandfather Benjamin Osgood Sr. railroaded his entire life. I never met him as a heart attack sent him to his final yard stop in 1944. However from that window I watched some of the same freight cars he oversaw as a conductor riding over the same rails. There is one of 3 pictures of him on the left, all three were taken on the same day. He is standing next to the house he lived in when my mother was a teen. Later when I was a teenager my parents rented this same house and my Grandmother lived upstairs.

The street this house is on dead ends at the railroad tracks. Just before supper each night my Uncle Ben would run to the end of the street and when Grampy's train passed he would toss his bedroll and lunch pail from the caboose for his son, Ben, to carry home. A half mile further up the track his train passed the window I watched from as a child, then crossed the river to the Bangor Yard. After his train was safely sidetracked for the night my Grandfather would walk the 3 miles home to supper unencumbered by his personal baggage.

Now a grandfather myself I'm attempting to pass at least an appreciation of the railroad heritage to my grandsons using model railroads, pictures, train trips and this web site designed by my daughter, Bonnie. Hopefully "Grampy's Train Room" will help in that educational process as well as provide a comfortable place for other rail fans, hobbyists and train buffs to layover and share some of the sights, sounds and places I have visited.At the top of this page I'm pictured at the throttle of # 40 on the valley railroad in Essex, CT on my 50th birthday. This was an unforgettable gift given to me by my loving wife of 36 years. That hour was the shortest of my life and I could almost feel the presence of my Grandfather guiding me as we steamed through the Connecticut Valley with coal smoke in our nostrils and the wind in our faces.

Please view my pictures on the web at these New England Rail Achieve Sites http://naphotos.nerail.org (all of North America) or http://photos.nerail.org (New England only). Click on View by poster, select letter "D", scroll down to and click on Steve Doughty.

Thanks for visiting, come back often.