TRAIN TIME: 2023 Christmas Train Layout - Pt 2h K-Line's KCC Christmas Village Set #42101 A few pictures of the Christmas Garden

I thought I'd post a few photos of the K-Line Christmas Village kits as they appear on the Christmas Garden at present. It's not an elaborate display, but using K-Line trains and buildings as the basis for a Christmas Garden is something I've wanted to do for a long time and everything just happened to come together this year to make it possible. LED tea/votive candles are used to light the buildings and there approximately 30 units to turn on with all the LED trees, ornaments, and tea candles in the buildings (and I need a good dozen more!). It takes a few minutes to turn them all on but it's worth it. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

TRAIN TIME: 2023 Christmas Train Layout - Pt 2b K-Line's KCC Christmas Village Set #42101 (1992) #K-4051 Colonial House

When K-Line started producing buildings made from the old Marx tooling, one of the things they did with a few of the kits was to add a bit of extra color to them. Marx's kits tended towards bright, monochromatic schemes, while K-Line added additional realism through the use of multiple (and often muted) colors. Shown below are an original Marx Colonial House and an early version K-Line Colonial House. Later, K-Line would add even more details by coloring in mortar lines and even offering animation to this structure! 

For K-Line's very first Christmas Village, they changed the color of the walls, roof, and trim. The walls became gray for Christmas, while the roof is now tan, and the trim white. In addition, the shrubbery has been given a nice dusting of 'snow'! A bunch of sticker's needing cutting out from their backing sheet adorn the house for the holidays giving it a festive look. BTW, of the three Christmas villages K-Line produced, this is the only house to be found in any of them! I find that odd that they never included the Ranch House. But it are what it are! Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Original Marx Colonial House

Early K-Line Colonial House

Christmas Village Colonial House

Instructions remain generic regardless of what set K-Line placed their buildings in.

TRAIN TIME: K-Line K-4050 Colonial House Pt 3 Multi Color

Like Billy De Wolfe used to say, "Busy! Busy! Busy!" (okay, that one was for you folks old enough to even remember who Billy De Wolfe was). But "busy" describes what it's been like here. With temps here in Lost Wages finally coming down out of the 3-digit range, working in The Cave is more bearable and I've become re-energized into doing some work out there. More and more items from the collection are slowly finding their way onto fleaBay (seller: marxtoynut) and I've formulated a general plan on how the next train layout is gonna look like. Of course that 'plan' has changed about a half dozen times in the past few weeks but what the heck, at least I'm thinking about it.

Our last Train Time post was a Marx offering but this time around we're gonna spring back to K-Line and do a follow-up pictorial to their No. K-4050 Colonial House. We've looked at the powder blue and black version, and the white and black version. Today we'll check out the multi-color house. This house came at a time when K-Line was starting to offer a little more realism in their buildings. Simple color schemes evolved into slightly more complex and less 'bright' colors and with a little weathering they could fit right in to a scale model railroad landscape vs. the simplistic toy train one. Enjoy! Opa Fritz and Oma Bettina

 

TRAIN TIME: K-Line K-4050 Colonial House - Pt 2 (white and black)

As a follow up to our K-Line post back on March 16, we're showing another early version of the K-Line #4050 Colonial House, this one in white and black hard plastic. Fortunately the K-Line photos survived the hard drive disaster from last year and I'll be able to post more, unfortunately he same can't be said of the Marx trains. For now - Enjoy! Opa Fritz and Oma Bettina