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: My Christmas Train Layout - Still A Work In Progress

The Christmas layout is still being worked on and I'm waiting for more things to come in. I decided to annex Tintown and use it as additional Christmas display. The Marx Skyscraper and most of the German tin buildings were taken off the layout. I found - totally to my surprise - a Lemax carousel I got it as a present many years ago and never used it until now! I also have a bunch of cardboard and tin gingerbread type house that once were candy and cookie containers. I think they lend a nice touch! Enjoy! Opa Fritz

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!