Strickler had quit school after finishing eighth grade at Liberty School because his family had moved near Linden Hall outside Dawson, which would have required him to walk 3 miles just to catch a trolley to go to school. He worked on a nearby farm, milking cows and handling a team of horses pulling the plows and discs that prepared the fields for planting. Before the United States entered World War II on Dec. 7, 1941, Strickler followed his father into the Monessen Southwestern Railway, working in the maintenance department. He only lasted six months at the rail yard before the U.S. Army drafted him and placed him into the newly formed Army Air Forces, where he repaired B-24 bombers. During part of his duty, he was repairing planes from a base in southern Italy. At one time, he was stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, where he said temperatures dropped to 32 degrees below zero. After his discharge, he returned to the Monessen Southwestern Railway, where he became a supervisor of electric locomotive trains for 25 years at the Monessen rail yard. He worked there for 44 years before retiring in 1986, when Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. shut down its Monessen mill. Strickler began his woodworking and building model trains while still working on the railroad, but retirement gave him more time to do it, Russo said. Strickler has built a wooden model of the Layton railroad bridge, which crosses the Youghiogheny River near Perryopolis, and is on display at the Perryopolis Area Heritage Society's museum in Perryopolis. A replica of a Monongahela Railway locomotive that he built is on display in a Brownsville museum, Strickler said. Strickler also has built a replica of the Monessen Southwestern's No. 10 steam locomotive, which was “a real workhorse” at the mill, lugging cars loaded with slag up to a nearby dump in Rostraver Township. Not all of Strickler's wooden trains are on public display. A 9-foot-long wooden train featuring a locomotive and four railroad cars, including a coal tender and caboose, sits in the living room window of his house. “He's got a wooden train on every windowsill,” and has built several cabooses with night lights in them, Russo said of her father. He also has made intricately-designed wooden napkin holders, rocking horses for his grandchildren, as well as a wooden tractor and rocking airplane. His daughter said that over the years, people have offered to buy his wooden creations from him, but he has not sold them. In addition to the wooden trains he has built over the years, Strickler's love of trains has extended to model railroading . He has an extensive HO-scale model train layout featuring more than 300 feet of track and 81 model train cars in a basement layout. Read more: http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourwestnewton/5156798-74/strickler-railroad-wooden#ixzz2n9APY6YY Follow us: @triblive on Twitter | triblive on FacebookiTunes com download is a media player and media library application developed by Apple Inc. It is used to play, download, and organize digital audio and video on personal computers running the OS X operating system and the iOS-based iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices, with editions also released for Microsoft Windows.itunes for windows 8