TRAIN TIME: 2023 Christmas Train Layout - Pt 3b K-Line #K-012103A North Pole Village (2004) #K-012103 North Pole Control Flight Tower

The K-Line North Pole Village consisted of five structures and I'll be posting them in item number sequence. I must say that K-Line actually used a bit more creativity putting this set together than they did with their previous two Christmas villages. Using what tooling they already had was of course expected, but the graphics used was a notch above their previous efforts. Unlike the other two village sets wherein each individual kit had a copy of the assembly instructions, this set has one master assembly 'manual' - see yesterday's post.

The first structure we'll post is their Flight Control Tower - an excellent detail for any North Pole village. I can imagine during the off season when all the reindeers are in flight training that the skies above the North Pole get pretty congested! 😄 The tower building was not made to simply snap together like all the other K-Line buildings as the two wall assemblies are meant to be glued together. HOWEVER, I cheated. I used the Christmas bulb sticker decorations like tape and simply 'taped' the walls together. That way I can disresemble the structure and put it away.  Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Notice the 'bulbs' which are printed on clear acetate - essentially just adhesive tape - and how they wrap around the corners. This is how the walls stay together without gluing them!

On this wall there should have been a sign reading "NORTH POLE CONTROL FLIGHT TOWER", but I'm afraid I messed it up - oh well! 😔

TRAIN TIME: 2023 Christmas Train Layout - Pt 3a K-Line #K-012103A North Pole Village (2004)

This year's Christmas Garden has two of the three Christmas village sets made by K-Line. I've already covered the K-Line Collector's Club Christmas Village made in 1992. Their second set was called "The Town of Yuletide" which came out in 1994 and I haven't even opened the factory sealed box for that one yet. Instead, I skipped to their last Christmas offering, the North Pole Village from 2004. 

This North Pole Village set has three stores and a church - no houses! I find that to be a really odd choice by K-Line because the word "village" implies a place where people live - ergo, they need housing. Of all three sets only the first one offers a house even though K-Line had at their disposal the tooling for the suburban ranch house and the 'L'-shaped ranch house. 

By skipping to the third set - the one we'll start looking at today - I get a train station and Santa's Workshop which I thought were cool! Anywho, let's look at K-Line's version of the North Pole Village. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

This set has five individual building kits:

#K-012103 North Pole Control Flight Tower

#K-401106 Santa's Workshop

#K-402102 Reindeer Residence and Flight School

#K-403104 North Pole Train Station

#K-410009 Merrie Munchies Supermarket

The set has two types of stickers: those with graphics printed on a white paper background and those with graphics printed on clear plastic (imagine a large sheet of clear tape with graphics printed on it)

Nearly all the doors and windows are either molded into the walls, or were pre-assembled

Santa's workshop, the train station, and the airplane hangar - oops! I mean Reindeer Residence and Flight School - have the original grouping of accessories that came with the original Marx issues.

In a couple of instances, the graphics have already been applied to the walls