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He didn’t think twice - he jumped at the chance. In 2018, he discovered an opportunity to run that steam engine through his Fort Wayne Historical Society membership. All AboardĪfter six decades of collecting model trains, Krieger finally got to run a real one.Įven better, it was one of the steam engines he used to watch run by his house when he was a kid - a 765 engine from the Nickel Plate railroad. When he retired in 2015, his dream of running a train never went away. Over the years, he rode in passenger cars of steam engines multiple times, taking trips like Orrville to Pittsburgh and Fairlawn to Bellevue. He managed transmission planning for light poles, so he never worked with trains, but they remained on his mind. He worked for Ohio Edison and moved to Akron in 1981. He later followed a different track and majored in electrical engineering at the Indiana Institute of Technology in Fort Wayne. “We were the first ones at the crossing,” he says.
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His model train kept him interested, even when the steam engines on the Nickel Plate railroad stopped running that same year. When he was 6, he got one of those model trains - a Mark’s model that ran in a figure eight, recorded in some family home videos. On TrackĪround the holidays, Krieger, his friends and his neighbors looked forward to paging through a toy catalog, looking at pictures of model trains. He never stopped wanting that, and at 66 years old, he finally got behind the throttle of a steam engine. “I always wanted to be an engineer,” he says.
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He dreamt of someday running a real steam engine, ever since he saw the men leaning out the window, waving to him as the trains flew by. “Walking to school, discussing steam versus diesel - I loved it.” “My earliest memories are the trains going,” says the 69-year-old.
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