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Trains-N-TownsTM, the Official Newsletter of BIGIndoorTrains.com, BIGChristmasTrains.com, and HalloweenTrains.com
This newsletter is for people who like O scale, O gauge, S scale, and Christmas trains, including people who combine On30 or O gauge trains with collectible villages. It is produced in conjunction with the Big Indoor TrainsTM, Big Christmas TrainsTM, and HalloweenTrains.comTM web sites.
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- On the other hand, if you don't want to receive our e-mail updates, please e-mail me with a "Please Unsubscribe" message (worded any way you wish), and we will graciously remove you from our list.
- If you would like to subscribe to our free newsletter for garden railroaders (people running big trains outside), please join the Family Garden Trains Mailing List. By the way, you can subscribe to either, both, or neither, and we will just be glad to be of service, no matter what you decide.
- Finally, if you would like to subscribe to our free newsletter about Christmas traditions, please join our Christmas TimesTM Mailing List.
In this Issue
Ordinarily I like to get this newsletter out earlier, but we've been so swamped with urgent reader questions it's been hard to focus. You see, we really want you to have a great train experience, not only at Christmas, but the rest of the year as well.
And every year we get more questions. I try to answer the questions that relate to setting up trains for THIS Christmas first, but even those get so fast and furious that sometimes I don't dig out from under the pile until about April. Sorry about that. On the plus side, we've made lots of friends and gotten lots of great ideas from our readers.
I hope you're having a great holiday season, or if you've already left for vacation and you don't see this until you get back, I hope you HAD a great holiday season.
Topics discussed in this update include:
Howard Lamey takes another turn at a tinplate-inspired diner project, perfect for S or O tinplate railroads. This time he builds it on a frame of something a lot of folks have in their home anyway - a 16 oz. Nestles' Chocolate container. The project goes fast and comes out great. And we now have graphics for year-round, Halloween, and Christmas versions, so you have an excuse to make at least three of these eventually.
Click on the following link to see the project
 In addition, if you have time on your hands this winter, take a look at our other "Tribute to Tinplate" building projects, based on the lithography of the earliest metal trains and towns. Downloadable graphics, instructions, and plans are all free.
Click on the following link to learn more:
 Christmas Train Day, 2014 - Report
We our seventh annual Christmas-themed open railroad on our own New Boston and Donnels Creek on November 23 this year. As always, there were many preparations. This year, we added another kids' railroad and attempted to make the kids' railroads we already have more reliable so the kids would be less frustrated. As it turned out, it's a good thing we did, since we got many more kids than adults this time, and the kids all had a blast.
Click on the following link to see our report, with lots of photos and tips.
 Notes on a Coca Cola Ad
A recent You Tube video shows a Coca Cola ad that is ostensibly inspired by a vintage Coke advertisement. It's very sweet, and has a few seconds of a great locomotive - the Nickel Plate Berkshire - in operation. But if you had a sense you were seeing a sort of mini-Polar Express when you saw it, you weren't wrong. The Berkshire in the Coke commercial is nearly identical to the locomotive in the Polar Express movie. Although the Polar Express locomotive is ostensibly based on a Pere Marquette Berkshire, they were built in the same factory to the same overall blueprint. Why would I know this? My own grandfather -whom I never met - use to drive the Nickel Plate Berkshires in Ohio, and that was always one of my father's favorite locomotives.
Now if they had got Tom Hanks to put on the conductor's uniform (almost identical to the one in the movie), they'd really have something. :-)
Thanks to all the folks who helped put the Coca Cola mini-movie together. Here's hoping it stays available for a long time.
If you haven't seen the commercial yet, click on the following link:
If that brings back great memories, or even memories you wish you had, you might enjoy rereading our article "What do Trains have to do with Christmas?" Click the following link to see this article on the FamilyChristmasOnline.com page:
Another friend, author Antoinette Stockenberg sets up an elaborate putz village every year. She populates it with little German metal figures called Zinnfiguren. An irrepressable story teller, Antoinette started giving her little people names, and then she started telling their stories every year. As I post this, she is still working on this year's edition, but I wanted to get my newsletter to you. So for the next few days, you can use these links to see last year's version, after which the new version will magically appear. Of course, you could always use the navigation buttons on Antoinette's page to jump all the way back to 2006, and by the time you caught up, 2014 might already be posted.
To see Antoinette's putz displays and the stories that go with them, please click the following link.
Our friend Howard Lamey has been building reproduction and custom cardboard Christmas "putz" houses for several years. He has helped us put together dozens of putz-house and related projects (see below). But more than that, he's been an inspiration and has constantly encouraged other folks trying to get started in the hobby.
To see Howard's home page, please click the following link:
To see free downloadable instructions, plans, and graphics for building your own little glitterhouses, please click the following links:
To see more of Howard's houses on Picasa, click the following link:
Train Favorites This Year
In our buyers' guides, we often recommend certain trains that we have experience with or just plain like. We can only track train sales that vendors report back to us, and they don't all report, so our input may be skewed. Also, we know it's too late to order trains for Christmas this year, but it's always fun to take a look at what people are actually ordering.
This year, nearly half of the Christmas-season sales we've tracked have been for Lionel O gauge trains, with Christmas-themed Lionels edging out real railroad names.
More-or-less tying for second place are:
- Bachmann and Piko Large Scale (garden-sized) trains, about evenly split between Christmas-themed and real railroad names.
- Lionel "G" battery powered toy trains, which are not nearly as solid, but not as expensive either. Christmas-themed trains are in the vast majority, which implies that folks are planning to use these around the tree. Hope they bought a lot of batteries.
- Hawthorne Village trains, which include On30 trains like Coca Cola trains and sports-themed HO trains, all made by Bachmann - unfortunately, I don't have an easy way to sort out the proportions of these sold.
Off brand, very discounted toy trains come in at a very, very distant fifth (thank goodness - most of them won't last a day around the tree). Other scales like HO and N come in as onsies and twosies.
But something almost as interesting is that a full third of the trains we tracked have Polar Express themes, indicating that the draw of that movie is still strong. Since all of these are Lionel products this year, that bode well for the company.
Here's a quick list of links to remaining "Big Trains" available as of December 10, 2014 - watch for shipping times, some may be hard to get by Christmas.
 Large Scale Trains in Christmas Colors - To see the Large Scale trains that are jaw-dropping around the Christmas tree, click the following link:
 Large Scale Trains in Railroad Names - To see our best currently-available recommendations, click the following link:
 Large Scale (Garden-sized) Trains for Kids - To see Large Scale trains that are designed to be kid-friendly, click the following link:
 O Gauge Trains in Railroad Names - To see the Lionel trains that are painted for PRR, NYC, UP, and other "real-world" railroads, for year-round model railroads, click the following link:
 O Gauge Trains in Christmas Colors - For seasonal railroads and Christmas trees. Click the following link:
 On30 Trains in Christmas Colors - Hawthorne Trains - delightful limited series that won't be made again once the current run ends. Click the following link:
 On30 Trains in Railroad Names
- For narrow gauge railroading inspiration, click the link below and scroll down.
Keep in Touch
Each month, we get more interest in this newsletter, in the site, and in the trains and towns we discuss. We welcome your questions as indicators of what we should be working on next (also, we always try to answer reader questions quickly). In addition, if you have any photos, tips, or articles you'd like to share with your fellow hobbyists, please let us know. All of the hobbies we report on grow best when we all learn together.
In the meantime, please accept our very best wishes for a great autumn and holiday season!
Paul Race
BigIndoorTrains.com(tm)
BigChristmasTrains.com(tm)
HalloweenTrains.com(tm)
FamilyGardenTrains.com(tm)
To view the Trains-N-TownsTM newsletter for November, 2014, click on the following link:
http://bigindoortrains.com/trains_n_towns/14_11_newsletter_indoor.htm
To read more, or to look at recommended Indoor or Garden Railroading products, you may click on the index pages below.
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Nestles' Quik Diner Project
Antoinette Stockenberg's Christmas Putz and Story Pages
Get Your Putz House Fix Here