Previous Christmas's

I just felt like posting about some of my previous Christmas experience. Part of this ties in with my love of trains. I don't remember the year exactly, but it was quite a while back. My ex and I had seen some of those cute little houses that are used for Christmas. You know, the ones with the light in them. We thought it would be a nice addition to our Christmas settings.

We ended up really getting into the little houses and after a few years of collecting them had 27 of them. At first, we just put them on top of one of my speakers that were in the living room. Mind you I had BIG speakers in those days. They were big enough to sit a 19" TV on them, just to give you an idea how big.

But, we did start with a small set of houses to begin with, a set of 3. Then we added to that and the next year, I found myself buying a hollow core door and drilling holes in it to put the houses on. Naturally, I added a small loop of track and purchased an old time steam engine with a few cars to run around. Pretty Christmassy huh?

I'd run the cords for the lights through the holes I drilled in the door so that they didn't show when viewing the little village that we had.

After about 3 years of collecting little houses in various sets, we ended up with the 27 that I mentioned earlier. By this time, we moved the "village" to our dining room. Also by this time, the village was on 2 hollow core doors, also with holes drilled in them and lay ed out side by side, giving it a roughly 6X6 ft size.

We numbered the houses and drew a diagram of where they would sit so we could set them up the same way each year. This " village" ended up having many nice features in it, including working street lamps, roads, a pond, and countless details.

I expanded the train track to go all the way around the edge of the village which made it look quite nice. We even added a scenic backdrop to make it look as though it were in the mountains. It was quite the job to put it all together and it sat on 2 wooden sawhorses. The edges of the doors had some red plastic from a table cloth attached to them to hide the sawhorses.

The part that I liked though, was after Christmas. I would get out my other trains and run them around the track. Not quite a Christmas scene, but I did have fun with it. My ex used to say that I would run my "monster" trains after Christmas was over lol. It was a bit out of place to run modern diesels and big boxcars in a late 1800, early 1900 period setting, but I did get to have fun.

I no longer have any of the village pieces. And I don't yet have a layout to run my trains on. But someday I will. Till then I will have fond memories of running my "monster" trains at Christmas. Till next time BYE!!