Growing up in Troy in the 50s-70s was a time when the city was still intact and a manufacturing city.

Brushes were made in the North End, collars and shirts in Mid-City, and rolling steel in the South End. But the heart of the city was Union Station, where people came to Troy from all over the world, and some to visit May Faye, but that’s a different story.

My father was the platform manager for the REA (Railroad Express Agency), the company that picked up the US mail from the mail cars and brought the sacks to the post office and vice versa. I used to ride in the back with my friend Paul and make tunnels through the hundreds of sacks when we took the air mail to the Albany Airport. It was fun times.

I lived across from the RPI campus on Eighth Street, just up the hill from the railroad station. The station was torn down in the late 50’s, and gone were Troy’s railroad days.

Spring ahead to the 1970s. I was doing a radio show at WRPI and became familiar with a large student railroad layout that was built by the students in the 35-foot x 125-foot basement of Davison Hall dormitory. Remarkably, they had reproduced the layout of the Union Station and the area around it, as........

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