TRAIN TIME: The Beginnings of The Madness

If you're a follower of Toys & Stuff (and I urge you to sign up as follower of the blog to keep up with the latest posts) you know that I actually started out as an HO scale model railroader. I had been interested in HO since my teenage years but something happened a little over twenty years ago that would change everything. Does one really know when madness begins? Perhaps it's easy to look back and pick a point at which something inside changed. When the world as you once saw it began to take on the appearance of the world as you now view it. It was actually Model Railroader magazine that can be blamed for the long, gradual slip into insanity. In the late '80s the magazine published a series of articles about tinplate trains which covered Lionel, American Flyer, Hafner, Marx and others and for me it was so fascinating to see these big, colorful toys from a bygone era and they enchanted me so. HO scale had been losing its luster for a long time and these lovely old toys re-awakened my interest in trains.

Upon arriving back in the States from Germany in late 1991 there were so many things to have to worry about: setting up a new house, getting the kids in a new school, and more. Hobbies took a back seat at this time. BUT THEN, my youngest daughter asked for the darndest thing for Christmas - a train set!! Honest, I did not push her or otherwise try to influence her! She thought it would be a nice toy. Welllll, let it not be said that poppa wanted to let his daughter down soooooo, I bought us, um, I mean HER a train set :-) This next picture is the only one we have of her first train set under the Christmas tree. It's also the very first train set under a tree ever for me. Even though I had a '50s era American Flyer train set as a kid, my folks never, ever set it up for Christmas. It's a hole in my childhood I look back at from time to time with sadness. I mean after all, we had the train, why couldn't it have been set up?? I'll never know, but any of you parents out there take note. Trains may not be for everyone but if you have them it's just a really nice thing to do to set them up for the holidays.

The train we set up in 1991 is a modern era Lionel New York Central freight set with a tender that made an awful racket by means of BBs rolling about within it's belly (it was supposed to act as 'train sounds').

Sometime between when this train was set-up and the following year, I started buying trains. Bigger trains. Not HO scale, but toys. It was during this 1991-92 period that I can trace the beginnings of madness - the insanity that grabs a collector when 'the bug' hits! And boy, did I get bit! You can tell by the 1992 picture below that we are no longer setting up trains on the carpet but have a proper base for them along with buildings and people and trees and stuff too! Like the photo above, this is the only photo we have of that layout.

  We always  Enjoyed & Loved it :)



Memories of Christmas Past - Pt 2

Last week we took a glimpse into the f-a-r distant past. :-). well, okay, it only seems like that sometimes! Today we're going to fast-forward a couple of decades to the 1990s. It's 1991 and by now I have a family and we have transferred from Germany to the States and settled into a house. I had become restless in my hobby, HO scale model trains, and wanted to try something different. In the 1980s, just prior to us coming Stateside 'Model Railroader' magazine had launched a series of articles on 3-rail toy trains, mostly Lionel, and these just fascinated me. They were nostalgic, bright, and big! It also seemed that folks who got involved in 3-rail didn't worry a whole heck of a lot about 'scale' fidelity', enjoying them for what they really were - TOYS! I wanted to be able to just play with trains and not feel obligated to have to spend hundreds of hours detailing every nano-acre of scale model real estate. Don't get me wrong, scale model railroading can be incredibly satisfying but it takes FOREVER to get the littlest of projects done.

The first tangible result of this switch to 3-rail was at Christmas 1995 as shown by the photos below. I built a 'U' shaped layout of Styrofoam, edged with pre-stained plastic moulding. Short legs were placed under the platform for support. If you remember me talking about the plastic tree I bought in the seventies, you'll ssee it below! Enjoy!

The De-Evolution of A Christmas Train Garden

When we moved in to the house there was room for a nice sized train garden, but as the years progressed and other rooms were pressed into service for other things, the living room began to 'shrink' as it were, filling up with furniture and  there was no longer sufficient room for a big layout.

1995

The trains are Lionel's Santa Fe Passenger Set with Alco Diesel's. What a terrific set. You can see it running on my current layout here:

Lionel and New Marx Passenger Trains On The MaP

No fake snow anywhere - I didn't want the mess. Just Styrofoam!

The streets are black construction paper cut and glued directly to the base.

The Park is a piece of Masonite cut, painted, and glued to the base. The 'snow' is white caulk spread on the base.

Most of the buildings are from Target and are an example of early Christmas-time ceramic buildings.

1998

Apparently I didn't feel like taking pictures this year. This is the only some-what decent photo of this years' train garden. You'll notice that it shrunk! Using the base from the previous larger layout, I cut it down to fit the small corner it was shoe-horned into.

2006

By now there isn't room for much of anything in the living room in regards to Christmas Train Gardens. A small round table from another room was drafted into train garden duty. A round table top blank was placed atop the table, a tree skirt laid down, and a small, pre-lit Christmas tree placed in the middle. A circle of track, some small buildings, and a short train complete the ensemble.