TRAIN TIME: My 2020 Christmas Train Layout Pt 1

I don't do Christmas layouts every year and this was the first year I tried to do one out in The Cave. It's also the largest display I've done in many years. 

It started as a simple oval and some of my Harry London Chocolate tin-litho buildings along with the wooden LED-lit Christmas houses I bought last year at Target - and then it just sort of grew. I expanded into the section of the 'L' shaped board I've been referring to as 'Tintown', bought some Lemax animations and finally brought out the Lemax Carousel I got as a present a long ago and somehow never found a use for. There are approx 160 trees of all shapes, sizes, and materials on the layout and of those, a whole bunch are LED-lit acryllic trees. When all was said and done I was pretty satisfied! Enjoy! Opa Fritz

The Harry London Chocolate tins can be seen in the back row of buildings

The Trains

An RMT North Pole and Snowflake Express Beep with shorty cars

A MTH/Railking Trolley

A Custom Marx Train with Additional New Marx Cars

Not sure who did this custom Marx engine and tender, it was a fleaBay find many years ago

A Scott and Bobbye Moss custom

A Modern Marx issue

A Scott and Bobbye Moss custom

A Modern Marx issue

Two Scott and Bobbye Moss customs

The Buildings

Here's a custom re-make by Scott and Bobbye Moss bought about 7-10 years ago. They would take beat-up buildings and decorate them for the holidays and I for one am pleased to have this in the collection

Lemax Animations

Lighted Lemax Buildings

TRAIN TIME: The Edge of Town Layout Starts Getting a Makeover - Pt 8 More New Buildings and Running Lionel's New York Central Flyer Set

I finally got around to putting on the new chimney and painting the roof of the Plasticville Freight Platform. I purposely wanted a used/beat-up freight Platform so that I could mess with it and try and give it my own touch. It was missing the chimney so I went to the parts box and grabbed a repo chimney that was made for Marx William Crooks passenger cars and super glued it on. The roof was then  given a coat of Krylon Slate Gray. 

New buildings on the layout now include a vintage Plasticville Corner Store and a new MTH lighted Gate Tower. Where the gate tower now stands used to be the spot for one of my Marx tin-litho signal towers. The footprint is nearly the same for both but the Marx tower was much taller and prone to being knocked over by me LOL

The area to the lower right of the layout -which I had begun to refer to as 'The Green' - is being defined by a set of K-Line Split Rail Fences. This set was of wooden fences was made by Lemax and packaged for K_Line back in 2003. At this time I placed an old Plasticville log cabin there as a way to set the scenic tone for the area but it's going to be swapped out here shortly.

AND for the first time in about 18 years I ran my Lionel New York Central Flyer set  #6-21990 with Railsounds. This was one of my favorite train meet runners back in the day and I missed running it. Don't ask me why I didn't play with it on previous layouts - just never got around to it I guess.

Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Here's the Plasticville Freight Station with new chimney and painted roof

 'The Green' is taking shape with new fences by Lemax / K-Line and a log cabin by Plasticville. When I was still hauling this around to train meets, I used to have the K-Line 'L'-shaped Ranch House in this corner.

To the right in the photo is the new Mike's Train House (MTH) Gate Tower. It has a light but I haven't yet gotten around to hooking it up. Unfortunately I didn't take pics of the Plasticville Corner Store - that'll be featured in a future post. 

MTH Railking Milwaukee Road Hiawatha Passenger Set

The Background:  I've been busy the last few days.  I have been trying to put together a nice video of the Mike's Train House (MTH) O-Gauge Railking Hiawatha.  The real Hiawatha was a named train of The Chicago, Milwaukee, St.Paul and Pacific Railroad, also called the Milwaukee Road and made its inaugural run on 29 May, 1935 .  The engines, designed by famed industrial designer Otto Kuhler, were some of the fastest steam engines ever built.  The styling is beautiful and timeless and is my favorite engine.  There are many toy and scale representations of these trains and the Railking version, while not to exact scale, is a very nice representative.  The cars are generic MTH passenger cars as the real Hiawatha had a more distinctive look and the observation car had a very distinctive 'beaver tail' design, quite unlike the Railking version.

The Video:  I took 19 separate videos - some short, some long - and chose Duane Eddy's "40 Miles of Bad Road' as the musical accompaniment as a nod to my sometimes less than stellar track laying :-)  This was my first video with a portion shot with most of the lights out in The Cave relying on lights from the layout as well as the lights on the passenger cars to provide illumination.  I also had a couple of old Milwaukee Road jingles which were added at the beginning and the end of the video.  The engine itself just didn't want to smoke like it should have during filming.  The smoke unit finally came alive when I started to take still photos.  By that time it was too late to start taking videos again (the wife was calling me into the house and I was pooped - no more video taking that day).  The video itself was crafted using Roxio Creator 2010 software.  It had been a few months since I used it last and had to re-learn a lot of things.  So far I'm pretty pleased with it, although after it crashing a few times I finally learned to save my work frequently.  AND THEN, once I posted the video to YouTube (I call it Y'allTube) I noticed I had spelled the name of my own railroad wrong!!  DRATS!  My YouTube moniker is 'marxtoynut' and you'll notice two postings for the video - the original one and the corrected one.  Here's the link to the CORRECTED video:

 Railking Hiawatha Comes to The MaP

The Stills:  After finishing the video's I began to take still photos and some of them are presented here.  I was experimenting with different camera angles and some of the photos show the engine smoking, while others don't.  If you're a Milwaukee Road Hiawatha fan I hope you enjoy the photos and the video!