Sussex Warnings Or Dangers

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During my first few years in Sussex (1954-62) I lived with my parents and three brother/sisters in a very modest house about four blocks to the left of the train station in this view and only a couple of blocks away from the tracks. The whole house would shake and we could easily hear the warning horn signals at the several street crossings in town whenever the long freight trains rumbled through day and night. It so happened that both the large buildings of the Sussex Golden Ginger Ale plant and several rows of parallel tracks where cargoes could be shunted off to the side were located very close to where we lived.

This naturally led to my brother and I, along with our friends, spending a lot of time playing in and around the train tracks in those days before most families could afford a TV (even though we had been warned that the wheels of trains would 'suck us in' if we got too close to them). Sometimes we would walk out of town along the tracks until we came to bridges over small brooks, or we would put pennies on the rails and wait to see how flat they would be after a train passed by. Other times we would climb in and on top of the numerous boxcars or flatbed cars loaded with pulp-wood logs that were sitting in the marshalling yard. When we got bored with that, we would find ways to climb up onto the warehouse roof at the Ginger Ale plant for a better view of our surroundings. Of course the housing on the 'wrong' side of the tracks was even poorer than ours and they had their own 'gangs' that hung out, so we had to always be ready to high-tail it home if our two groups happened to bump into each other in this 'borderland' area. It is probably a good thing my parents did not know half of the stuff we were up to in those early days of amusing ourselves! The 2nd photo shows me on my best behavior with my mother watching behind we children, as my older brother was invested to a higher elevation as a Queen's Scout!