Railroad buff conducts nostalgia in basement museum

TOLEDO, Ohio — When Steve Rathke says, “This has given me signals for years,” he’s not speaking New Age.

His hand rests on a 3-foot-diameter canister with softball-sized red, green and yellow lights, once installed next to the tracks along Sandusky Bay here. He’d driven past it hundreds of times, checking the lit color to determine his next move as he hauled millions of pounds of freight between Toledo and Pittsburgh. When the signal was replaced, the railroad gave it to him (he’d asked for it) and it’s displayed with hundreds of other railroadiana in his 1,600-square-foot basement.

An exuberant spirit, Rathke, 44, is fond of wearing the traditional engineer’s striped overalls and Kromer cap. He doesn’t give a hoot when the guys at work tease him.

“When I was a child, engineers wore that,” he says. “I am living out my childhood dream.”

He’s been working on his remarkable railroad museum for about a year and a half.

A 600-pound side window from a cab (the locomotive in the front where the engineer and conductor sit) slides open between a kitchenette and lounge area. Nearby is a 1951 control stand, including the operator’s seat, throttle, brake handle and a railroad-issued monitoring radio.

There’s a crossing bell, crossing lights, lanterns, a semaphore (an antique signal) and an old steam whistle, all working. Walls are covered with safety posters and brochures, photos of Rathke as a kid on trains, schedules, timetables and paraphernalia from the grand opening of Toledo Union Station in 1950, which his father, Jim Rathke, attended when he was 6.

The kitchenette has china that once served train passengers, menus, place mats, napkins and kiddie bibs. Three large frames are filled cheek-by-jowl with railroad matchbooks, many of them with attractive graphics. There are disposable ashtrays, decks of cards and paper cigar bands.

Rathke is a third-generation railroad buff, but the first to exploit the patrilineal fascination into vocation as well as avocation. Growing up in Toledo, his family would get ice cream on summer evenings and go to a handful of favorite spots to watch trains. They took train vacations. He and his father built a large model railroad in the attic.

One spring day when he was 14, an engineer who had struck up a friendship with the family invited him and his father to ride with him. The next day, they played hooky and did. It was sheer joy riding in the cab with the engineer, tearing up the tracks at 80 mph, blowing the horn, waving at people, watching scenery fly by.

“That was the defining moment,” Rathke says.

When he graduated from high school in 1985, there were no openings on the railroad, so he enrolled at the University of Toledo, earned a business degree and got a job in sales. In his spare time, he earned certification as an engineer and volunteered on a local excursion train.

He and Renee Thornton married in 1991 and began their honeymoon in an ornate private train car, circa 1916, pulled by an Amtrak train to Washington.

A few years later, Renee Rathke heard from a friend that Conrail was hiring engineers. Experience helped the 26-year-old land the job.

Their first home in Toledo had train tracks behind it (that’s why they bought it), and when he’d chug past it Renee would wave and Maggie the dog chased the train.

By the time they began building their current home in 2007, Steve Rathke had a hefty collection of railroadiana.

The stairway is lined with safety information, a topic dear to his heart. A seven-year volunteer for Operation Lifesaver, he speaks dozens of times a year at driver’s-education classes and elsewhere, repeating the mantra: “Every collision is preventable.” Rathke has experienced the nightmare of hitting three cars and one pedestrian that left three dead: “All you can do is blow the horn and hope they get out of the way.”

Renee Rathke, who works as a financial manager at an engineering firm, knew from the beginning of his passion for trains. She’s behind the subterranean project.

“I love him. I also realize how important it is for him,” she says. “It’s kind of a history lesson, too, both of where he’s coming from and of railroading.”

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