The Westinghouse Company was part of my life since childhood. My dad worked at the East Pittsburgh plant, as did so many others who lived in Turtle Creek. His steady job enabled my brothers, sisters and me to go to college and move on to successful lives of our own. It was the common Eastern-European American story -- my grandparents barely finished grade school, my parents graduated from high school and we went to college.

Westinghouse was always in the background of our lives growing up. Even now my mother, at age 89, lives comfortably on the income from my dad's pension. I'll never forget the Open House at the factory when I was about 6. We were awed by Univac, a room-sized computer, but didn't realize we were looking at an unimaginable future. And my mother would tell us about the time she worked at Westinghouse during the war, making gun parts for the war effort. She still agonizes that what she was doing was for the purpose of killing people, even though she knew it was necessary to win the war.

But it took me until recently to learn about George Westinghouse himself. And it took a very special building to do it.

One day a year and a half ago, my brother told me he had been put in charge of the model train room at Westinghouse Castle in Wilmerding. He needed help to build the display.

My knowledge of Wilmerding was limited to the fact that it existed. It was terra incognita for me. But I love my brother, so I went to the castle and found, not only a model train room, but a stately building with a presence so commanding it seemed to be a living being.

Westinghouse Castle was George Westinghouse's original general headquarters. His office is there, richly paneled in carved wood, his brother Herman's office close by. The tower that housed his office was designed to protect his important papers -- records, patents and inventions -- from fires, one of which destroyed part of his first building in 1896. From his office window Westinghouse could look out over his Air Brake factory and Wilmerding, the town he built for his workers.

When I began to help with the train display, I met the lively people who run the building. They keep it going after the 2007 merger of the George Westinghouse Museum and the Heinz History Center, which took the museum artifacts to add to its own Westinghouse collection. Wilmerding Renewed Inc., the nonprofit organization that runs the building, promptly put a new museum in the rooms where the old one had been, focusing not only on Westinghouse but on the history of Wilmerding and the local communities surrounding it.

I came to the castle to work in the train room but was soon caught up in the permeating spirit of the building. Many times I wandered around the castle from top to bottom. The rooms on the executive floor are richly paneled, contain gleaming carved wood furniture and boast fireplaces of carved limestone. The rooms bespeak wealth and success.

But Westinghouse was a better boss to his workers than Carnegie or Frick. His first castle had recreational facilities for his workers, such as a bowling alley and swimming pool. After the fire, the building became his general headquarters and new facilities were built for the workers nearby.

My favorite part of the castle is the huge, spooky old attic with its several tiers of floors. It's like a building of its own. When we rescued some old chairs from the attic to put in the train room, we found, after cleaning the grime of years from them, they were in perfect condition, the oak frames still sturdy and the leather seats still pliable and soft. George himself might have once sat in them.

I still volunteer in the train room, meeting visitors and helping out. One of the best parts of being there is to see the faces of the children light up when they come into the room and see the trains running. Another great thing is hearing visitors say, "I used to work at Westinghouse, and I remember ..."

Pictures line the walls of the old castle, including some showing the women who worked in the Westinghouse factories during the war while the men were away fighting. I imagine my mother as one of them. She matter-of-factly recalls that the women were let go when the men returned and reclaimed their jobs.

The most awesome part of being in the castle is realizing that it was George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, not Thomas Edison, who almost single-handedly brought about the electrification of America, profoundly altering the way people lived their lives. This was truly the dawning of a new age, and it developed right here.

Helen Wilson lives in Squirrel Hill. For more information on the Westinghouse Castle, see www.wilmerdingrenewed.org or call 412-825-3000.