EULOGY for a FRIEND
By Bill Laughlin

A good friend, and fellow member of the Wichita Toy Train Club recent passed away after a sixteen-month battle with cancer. Bill Taggart was one of the original founding members of the club in 1985, never married, but always around to help with club activities. He served as Vice-President for most of those years, and as Sergeant-at Arms since the cancer diagnosis. What follows is an address the family asked me to give at the funeral.

How can you begin to sum up what a person was, and how much they meant to you in two minutes? It can’t be done, and yet the need is there to convey something of what a great loss we’ve looking at here.

The two words I find that best summarize Billy’s life achievements are excellence and devotion. Out of the depths of a tragic loss like this can arise some good. We’ve gotten to know his family a little bit better, especially his sister. The train club has a new project, to preserve his layout and collection. In times like this, people put their petty personal differences aside and work together towards a noble cause. If it had been one of us in his shoes—with a phenomenal layout and an incurable disease—I know he would have done the same.

Bill was an anachronism in 2003---he still believed in building nearly everything with his own hands, only rarely buying off-the-shelf buildings and accessories, and then if he did, he would weather, detail, and customize them. There are still classic modelers in our O-Gauge world, but largely this approach is a throw-back to the early high-rail days of the 1940’s and 1950’s, almost forgotten in our hurry-up and have-it now world.

Many stories can be told concerning taking the club modular layout on the road---to the many, many shows, both local and out-of-town. All of us in the Club can picture him even now precisely packing the back of his little Escort, the hatchback propped open by a piece of pipe. Everything in its exact place---and it all fit perfectly.

Bill was a friend to everyone. He relished having young children with eyes wide open, watching coal being unloaded, or milk car cans being ejected by the tiny man inside. In many ways, he retained the enthusiasm and passion of a child totally engrossed in a hobby.

He was well-respected by modelers of the more popular HO and N gauges. You have to realize that it is a rare individual who will stubbornly cling to a gauge that employs an “unsightly” third rail running down the middle of the track, even if it does add reliability. Billy not only stayed in 3-rail O, but built a layout the envy of the entire local train-modeling community, one that told the story of small-town America in 1880. We will have that layout for public display in the near future at our clubhouse.

Bill was a peacemaker. Despite being a club officer for 16 of our 17 years of existence, he was uncomfortable with chairing meetings and settling disputes. His methods were always low-key, and seeking compromise. Despite a club roster mostly of “loop-runners” (those that are happy running their trains endlessly around in a big circle) I never heard him disparage any of them. We never quite got the “Ultimate Layout” built, where trains are made up, sent to a destination, and taken apart again, just like in real life. He would have loved doing that, all day long.

Bill took pride in the growth of the Club, and welcomed everyone he met, as equals. That’s rare, also. Bill was a preservationist. He loved restoring old train engines, and was very reluctant to discard those that most of the rest of us would have. He’d just rebuild them! He was thrifty. If you doubt this, look at the car he drove, or the clothes he wore---simple, unassuming, and basic. He conserved and saved his time, resources, and passion for what he loved: family, the trains, and his many other pursuits.

Bill had an undying thirst for new knowledge. Many collectors get to a point where they stop progressing. For some, Lionel’s move to 100% Asian production, three years ago, created an invisible line in the sand---no more new stuff, just collect the 100 years of U.S. production. And regarding the slowly-encroaching digital electronics control technology, many long-time enthusiasts don’t want any part of it. But not Billy. He saw continuing excellence in the latest products, and wanted to stay up on it all. He read constantly. He bought the new electronically-enhanced steam locomotives. And he embraced the directions the hobby was headed. In fact, you could say he was way out in front of the last decade’s move towards increased realism in layouts: just look at his, which was designed in the early eighties.

One of the things I’ll always recall is the night in March at the clubhouse when Bill saw the newest control system demonstrated and (rare for him) expressed some regret that he would not be able to afford one of the new Santa Fe steam engines with special capabilities. At long last, the chuff rate could be set exactly by the operator. Indulge me for a moment while I attempt to explain---and why this was so important to him. “Chuff” is the individual puff sounds a steamer makes as its wheels go around. In real life, different models of engines might have made one, two, four, or more, depending on the model. It wasn’t enough that in the 1990’s, while trains were becoming exceedingly detailed---less toylike---that they began to emit digital recordings of real steam engine chuff sounds from a little amplifier and speaker inside the tender. No, they had to emanate precisely with each wheel revolution and the exact number should be correct, to satisfy Bill. He had been ecstatic when this feature---the ability to electronically change this by the operator---was announced two years ago. Now they were on the dealer shelves, and he was fully aware of it.

So he’s sitting there in the clubhouse, decimated physically by the cancer, and economically by the cost of treatment, which he had tried to bear personally, and I silently vowed that he would have one, some way, somehow. A Santa Fe 2-8-2 Mikado engine arrived two weeks ago and though I was away on vacation, not there to experience his joy, it must have been a moment for the ages.

His talents---irreplaceable…. His loyalty and devotion---admirable…. His love and passion---something to always remember and emulate.

Bill, you’ll always be in our hearts.

Bill Laughlin