A Christmas train adds to the Christmas spirit
It’s not often that you hear words like “locomotive” or “uncoupled” in a 3-year-old’s vocabulary, but that’s exactly where my wife and I found ourselves Christmas morning in 2022.
Our son Micah had always had a fascination with all trains, so much that we often joked that it was only partially hereditary. Living near the heart of Norfolk & Western’s Virginian territory, we’d make an annual December trip to the Virginia Museum of Transportation.There we’d visit an open house hosted by the extremely welcoming Roanoke Valley Model Railroad Club in the basement of the museum.
They had a small HO scale layout built just at kid’s height where the youngest visitors could race some of the Bachmann Thomas models around an oval track. Watching my son’s amazement at the club’s rooms full of models and seeing how well he did on their kid’s layout made me realize that it had been over 20 years since I last did anything with the hobby.
When my family moved from a house with a full basement where I was building an HO scale layout to a house without one when I was a teenager, my trains went into longterm storage and life moved on. Now in early November 2022 I sat on my couch wondering if we had enough room in our small cottage for some kind of train set that I could put together in time for Christmas.
Mostly on a whim, I ordered a basic DC N scale Bachmann Christmas train set with some Bachmann E-Z Track snap-together track, and decided we could put it around the Christmas tree for Christmas morning to see how Micah would handle it.
Initially I aimed to keep things simple, especially seeing he’d just be turning 3 years old the week before Christmas. By mid-November my plans had expanded to designing a roughly 28” x 43” plywood oval to place the Christmas train on top of which would let me build a tiny Christmas village to go with it.
I then designed a new Christmas tree stand using iron piping so I could place our artificial tree directly onto the layout. Cheap resin Christmas village buildings found on Amazon would round out the middle of the village. I added a small bridge along with a tunnel built from extruded foam. With only six weeks until Christmas, I was having to quickly research and learn parts of the hobby. These were things I had never made it to when I was working on my own layout as a teen: foam scenery construction, plaster terrain, and the various stages of painting and detailing that make a scene look convincing.
Much of my personal fascination with trains was thanks to my own dad who took us to train shows and on steam excursions in the 1990s. Something else I picked up from him is letting passion projects spiral out of control.
After finding a rare Christmas-themed observation car online and a new sound-equipped Digital Command Control (DCC) Great Northern Mikado steam engine to pull it just before Thanksgiving, I realized that I was all-in on this project.
The cheap and out-of-scale resin buildings were set to the side and I gathered a selection of used N scale buildings from eBay to populate the layout instead (many of them needing significant repairs — I called them my “Island of Misfit Toys” collection).
The race to Christmas
Over the next few weeks, I spent many hours studying YouTube channels like Steve’s Trains and DIY and Digital Railroad to speed-learn all of the artistic elements I needed to make Micah’s Christmas layout as realistic as possible. If I could manage it, I really wanted to try to match the detail of the club layouts that had amazed him that year. As I began the first plaster work and painting, I discovered how much I really enjoyed the scenery part of the hobby. I decided this would be extremely relaxing — if I wasn’t staring down a Christmas deadline now just three weeks away!
Some of the technical parts of the layout design I just happened to get right by accident. For example, keeping the bridge over the creek at only about a 3.5% grade and not making the sealed tunnel too long to have access to any derailments inside. Note that I would realize later — while working on larger layout projects — how carefully things like this need to be planned out ahead of time.
The other issue with doing a project like this so close to the holidays is that I was rapidly running out of online options for materials and our last local hobby shop had closed down more than 15 years ago.
Many of the nice high-end pre-painted and detailed N scale structures were too expensive for a project that was already far over my initial budget. So, I found myself building my first laser cut model kits to fill out the town details only seven days out from Christmas.
Sitting there late at night after Micah had gone to sleep practicing weathering techniques on the wooden church kit, I started to wonder if I really was in way over my head. From there the project was a blur of trying to do everything at once: tiny prop detailing, ballast, resin water pours, rocks and trees and shrubs, snow flocking, and on and on it went. There was also more wiring than I ever expected to get working crossing lights and interior lights for nearly all the buildings along with a full hinged panel for the light switches and controller.
I was so low on time that most of the electrical components — the toggle switches and power hubs for example — were never actually tested beforehand. Thankfully it worked when I hooked them up even though I’d never done it before. With so much detail now on the layout I also abandoned the idea of having it under the tree — it would live on our dining room table for a good month after Christmas instead.
The last two nights before Christmas were all-nighters to get things ready in time. I survived off of afternoon naps in order to get through the usual holiday events and dinners. I hot glued down the last N scale vehicles in the town at 8:30 a.m. Christmas morning while making more coffee — thankfully Micah slept in for once! He was amazed at the reveal with the sound-equipped steam engine chugging and hissing as it idled waiting for him. He even dropped his armful of stuffed animals on the floor as he was barely awake and in shock rounding the corner to see the final project.
The Christmas spirit continues on
Within a few weeks he was switching cars in and out of the shed on his own. Over the last few years, I’m happy to report that this layout remains his favorite even as we’ve started some larger projects to enjoy while it’s in storage for the summer.
Ahead of Christmas last year in 2023 I spent several weeks adding in more detail to the layout that I had always envisioned in my head. These were items I just didn’t have time for that first year such as more figures, vehicles, road signs, and other small details — even a Christmas tree farm! I also finally removed the iron pipe Christmas tree stand from the center and replaced it with a snowy hill with kids sledding and building snowmen. It was the last thing remaining from when this project had remained at a reasonable scope.
Next year we may build an additional module to connect to the original layout, which would include some new scenes inspired by the Polar Express film like a cityscape, a quiet snowy neighborhood with street-running tracks and perhaps even a North Pole scene hidden behind a mountain.
For this year though, we’re going to enjoy the holidays and spend some time running this layout instead of working on it!
A final cinematic tour video of the layout can be seen on my hobby YouTube channel.
What a great story, and what a path you have developed for your son and you. Congratulations! This is only the beginning…..
Merry Christmas!