The Train Under Your Tree - Toy Trains Make Great Gifts

The Train Under Your Tree - Toy Trains Make Great Gifts

Remember that magical Christmas morning you came downstairs to find your very first train set? For many of us, the holidays still officially begin only after our trains are up and running under the tree! Model trains and Christmas have gone together like red and green for generations, and there’s a fascinating story of how it all came to be. Setting up a Nativity scene started one Christmas Eve in 1223, and was one of many Christmas traditions that came to us from Europe that are still popular today. Although these started simply, by the mid-1800s some expanded into what we’d recognize as a Christmas themed village, including hand-made replicas of homes and farms. Trains were an essential part of daily life by this time and along with wooden and cast iron toys were soon added to these scenes. Things really got moving with the introduction of affordable wind-up engines (Bill Walthers first train was actually a wind-up locomotive received as a boyhood Christmas gift in 1899) running on a circle of tracks that were just the right size and shape to fit under a tree. Märklin wowed the world with the first train sets in 1891 that included everything needed to get started, but also introduced the idea of future expansion by adding more cars, locomotives, track, and buildings. In 1901, Joshua Lionel Cowen unveiled his first electrically powered model train, not as a toy, but as a display piece for store windows. At least that was the idea until one of his clients suddenly ordered six of them – customers came in demanding to buy the train instead of his other merchandise – and a year later, Lionel was in the toy train business to stay. Given the size of motors at the time these early electric model trains tended to be pretty big, roughly the size of today’s G Scale models, in an era when rooms in most homes were rather small. Many homes of the time did have a parlor, used only on Sundays or special occasions and playtime was usually limited to weekends as well. As toy trains were pretty easily combined with other holiday décor and added a lot of excitement, mom and dad could usually be persuaded to allow them to remain set up until the holiday celebrations were over. Demand for trains at Christmas would soon lead to another tradition, department store display layouts. The shopping malls of their day, these flagships of the downtown business district pulled out all the stops for Christmas, especially in the postwar years. Lionel was especially persuasive at getting stores to showcase new train sets and accessories on huge operating layouts, and also ran colorful magazine and newspaper ads suggesting model trains as gifts, prominently displayed under a very finely decorated Christmas tree.... That timeless image cemented the relationship of model trains with the holidays, but there were more and more folks taking down the tree but not the trains at the end of the holiday season. As model railroading gained more popularity, many of the innovations seen on toy trains found their way into scale models. Things gradually came full circle as the larger toy-makers moved on to other products, and smaller firms catering to model railroading took over production of model train sets. There’s no better way to rekindle those feelings and memories or start making new ones than with a holiday train set of your own. While the model trains themselves may have changed, you’ll find the magic of model railroading is still the same.