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This is our American stories, and our next story is brought to us by a regular contributor,

Bill Bright, who brings us the story of the Lionel Train.

Here's Bill with the story.

Once American Railroads dominated popular culture because they were the only means of fast land transportation.

Now, there are other ways to get there from here.

They seem less important, and toy trains share the marginalization of their prototypes. For perhaps a decade after World War II,

the technical, managerial, and promotional genius of Joshua Lionel Cohen, founder of the Lionel Corporation,

made his toy trains a solid part of American middle-class boyhood. In 1952 alone, Lionel produced 622,209 engines

and 2,460,764 freight and passenger cars.

Ron Hollander's delightful, lavishly illustrated biography of Cohen and his company,

All Aboard, states that Lionel's 1952 production eclipsed the nation's railroads, which had a mere

43,000 locomotives and 1.8 million cars in service. Joshua Lionel Cullen was born on Henry Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side on August 25, 1877.

He preferred playing ball, bicycling, hiking, and tinkering with mechanical toys to formal education,

and soon became fascinated with electricity, its transmission, and its storage in batteries.

In the labs at Peter Cooper Institute, he built what may have been, or what he claimed was, Cohen had no false modesty,

the first electric doorbell. In 1890, he patented a device for igniting photographer's flash powder by using

dry cell batteries to heat a wire fuse. Cohen then parlayed this into a defense contract to equip

24,000 Navy mines with detonators. His ignorance of armament manufacture did not stop him.

He used mercuric fulminate, a sensitive and powerful explosive. His supplier's deliverymen told

him, the company said you should always keep a good deal around. It's better to be dead than

...