All About Aurora Postage Stamp Trains
About Bob Williams, Super-Collector
I retired after 32 years at UPS about 3 years ago. As a kid I was always the one who had an exact thought on what I wanted. I wanted an Aurora Postage Stamp train for Christmas, almost certainly it was 1967 as the set I wanted was a 4701 Santa Fe set. A favorite memory is it must have been my turn in the downstairs bedroom (two brothers upstairs) and the door was not shut tight and I saw my dad looking at the set before it was wrapped. Can picture it like it was yesterday! I still have that set. I have met a great bunch of people through the years through the APS collecting with a special shout out to John Reidy. I had looked for APS items through the years with almost no luck but then the internet and ebay showed up. Amazing how fast it grew after that. I am really pretty much just a collector. I had a Woodlands Scenic Ridge layout but just not that much into operating.
Also collect Schwinn bikes and still have my childhood 1968 Campus Green Rams Horn Fastback sting ray bike. You can see a pattern here, I kept all my stuff nice and still have a lot of it. My two brothers have nothing from their childhood. Maybe the middle child syndrome.
One collecting story is I bought a 4700 foam layout (the one in my pic) from a seller in Indianapolis about a 5 hour round trip and went to pick it up to eliminate shipping risk. All went well but was surprised to see the original shipping label was to a store 5 minutes from my house! Another involves a Canadian bus set I won on ebay. After not receiving it I e-mail the seller, no reply. I get his contact number and his roommate says he is in jail but here is his mom’s phone number. I call her and she gives me the number to the Mountie station where he is. These sets are tough to find and I’ve went this far so what the heck I call. The Mountie is very nice and hands the phone into the cell to the seller who is apologetic and says he will ship it when he gets out in a week. Unbelievably, two weeks later here it comes in the mail. Persistence paid off!