After my humble beginnings with photos and stories published in Rail Classics when I was in my teens, I was not quite 21 when Jim kindly accepted one of my first submissions to Pacific News.
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He clued me in to his involvement with OERM and invited me to pay the museum a visit, which I did in January 1984 (just a few months before I moved from Orange County to Idaho). Thanks to Jim, I got my first serious introduction to what rail preservation looks like.

Just four years later, in the summer of 1988, I was living in (of all places!) New Jersey and on the staff at Railfan & Railroad when I got to see Jim one final time. NKP 765 powered a round trip from Bound Brook, NJ, to Harrisburg, PA, as part of the NRHS National Convention. Jim was sitting at the open window of a right-hand seat in one of the coaches, newspaper on his lap and folded open to the crossword puzzle page, pencil or pen in his hand. Mike Schafer of Passenger Train Journal was across the aisle at his own open window. And elsewhere in the car were Dave Ingles of Trains and all three of us editors from R&R (myself, Mike Del Vecchio, Jim Boyd).

At one point, someone mentioned that if the trip were to suffer a similar (or worse) fate as the Great Dismal Swamp derailment from two years prior, much of the railfan magazine world would have been in turmoil.

Hard to believe it's been more than 30 years since that steam excursion with Jim Walker. I wish there had been a few more opportunities to spend time trackside or onboard with him, and thank him for having helped a young, naive railfan get his start in the hobby and business of rail publishing. It's safe to say that Jim's involvement in magazines and preservation enriched the lives of countless others as well.