I hope you are old enough to have experienced the pure joy of having taken one or more railroad journeys. When I was in the third grade, our elementary school took all the students on a field trip to ride a real passenger train perhaps thirty miles to a nearby city. It was a very exciting experience for me and all of my classmates. We were met by school buses to take us back to our school, and that bus ride certainly paled in comparison to the train trip we'd just experienced.

I was so impressed with trains that I whined for, and received, my first Lionel train set that Christmas. It was wonderful. It was at that time, too, that my brother, twelve years older than me and already a die-hard train aficionado, began sharing stories with me about our maternal grandfather (who died before I was born), and the walks he would take after dinner each night to take my brother to the local train station to wait and watch the Southern Railway train pass by. The engineer on that line knew my grandfather, saw him and my brother there practically every evening year-round, and always blew the locomotive whistle an extra time for them. My grandfather later gave my brother a signal lantern with a clear glass globe, typically used by a brakeman or conductor. Few of these original vintage lanterns from the late 1800s or early 1900s still exist, and it is probably the most prized possession my brother owns.

Ancestry Magazine just published an article I wrote in its May/June 2005 issue. It is titled, "Making Tracks through Railroad Records" and in it I discuss effective methodologies for researching your railroading ancestors. In "Along Those Lines . . ." this week, I want to share some of the best places on the Internet to begin your research, and I hope you'll also look for my article to further help you.

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