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Trains-N-TownsTM, the Official Newsletter of BIGIndoorTrains.com and BIGChristmasTrains.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 and Big Christmas Trains web sites.
- If you did not get this Trains-N-TownsTM newsletter through your own e-mail, and you would like to get the newsletters in the future, please join our Trains-N-TownsTM Mailing List
- 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.
- Also, 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.
In this Issue
2011 has been a strange year for many reasons, including job changes and family responsibilities that made it hard to keep up with things. If you feel like you haven't gotten a newsletter for several months, it's because you haven't. That said, we are continuing to get content, ideas, reader questions, and reader suggestions about indoor trains and related topics. I'm hoping that as some of the chaos resolves, I will be able to do better in the future.
Many of our readers know that we've been supporting cardboard Christmas house collectors and builders with the "Glitterhouse" primer articles. This fall, we've started a CardboardChristmas.com site to make information on this hobby easier to find. That site has a discussion forum. If it works out the way we think it will, we may be tempted to start discussion forums for some of the other hobbies we support. After all, many of our readers know more about a lot of subjects than I do. Letting you interact with each other will be a good thing for all of the hobbies we support, I think. Plus a few actual "putz house" experts are dropping by the CardboardChristmas.com forums, so be sure to sign up and ask hard questions. :-)
For those of you who've been using our building photos, we've added a high-demand structure - an old-fashioned fire house.
In addition, we've been working behind the scenes to keep up with trends and to answer literally hundreds of letters from readers. And new readers keep signing up. So from our perspective, the hobbies we support still seem to be growing nicely, even if folks aren't laying out a bundle every time they go to the store. I'm not either, so don't feel bad.
We have more articles in the works, so stay tuned.
If, like many of our readers, you're still waiting for the "recovery" to do you and your family some good, please accept our prayers and best wishes for a much better 2012.
Finally, please accept our warm wishes for a great holiday season. And please especially enjoy any time you can spend with your family in these precious days.
Paul
Topics discussed in this update include:
We are now preparing for our FOURTH annual Christmas-themed Open Railroad on the New Boston and Donnels Creek (Paul's railroad). We're going ahead despite being WAY too busy most of the year. For one thing, several families have come to count on this as a way to "kick-start" their holiday season. For another, as a part of the Dayton (Ohio) Train Show's open railroad schedule, it gives us a chance to promote garden trains to folks who have just come from seeing a series of itty-bitty trains in crowded basements.
If you don't know what an "open garden railroad" is, it's a time for folks to drop by and see trains running outside. "Christmas-themed" means that for this event, we decorate dozens of trees, play christmas music "soundtracks," pop popcorn, bake treats, and do all we can to make our little empire into a "winter wonderland" for visitors. We also set out extra trains for the kids to run. Weather permitting, we usually have a movie showing on an outdoor screen, and this year we may even have live musical entertainment, so there's a lot to come out for. Of course, if you'd like to help run trains, supervise kids, make treats, provide Christmas music, or anything along that line, we'd be thrilled to have the help as well.
To learn more, get directions, or volunteer to help, please click the link below.
For a description of how things turned out on our 2010 open railroad, click the link below:
Indoor Train and Christmas Site News:
 New Site for Cardboard Christmas Houses - Through our friendship with Howard Lamey (of LittleGlitterhouses.com), we've gotten to know many great collectors, restorers, and builders of traditional cardboard Christmas houses and related vintage structures. We've also come to realize that many of the best resources for supporting this hobby are pretty hard to find. So with the help of a small circle of indoor railroaders, Christmas collectors, putz house fans, putz house builders, and tinplate railroaders, we have set up a separate site called CardboardChristmas.com. Currently, this site contains a few articles and links to the best information we could find, about the history, collecting, purchasing, and making of cardboard Christmas houses of all kinds. Forums for user interaction, and a long list of articles we hope to add soon indicate that there is plenty of room for growth.
For more information, please click on the link below
Firehouse Addition to Indoor Resources Page - Many of you have used our cleaned-up-and-scaled building photos to give depth, interest, and authenticity to your indoor or temporary railroads. I had hoped to post more photos this year, but I did manage to post one building that several people have asked for - an old-fashioned fire house. For more information, click the appropriate link below and scroll way down the page.
If You Have More Time than Money This Christmas -
Most of the projects below can produce an heirloom-quality collectible for little or no cash investment. Grow your railroad or display village and shrink you holiday budget at the same time.
For antique train collectors, consider making a tinplate-inspired structure or accessory for a hundredth of the cost of the original:
For cardboard Christmas house fans, consider make a unique new glittered house based on traditional designs:
For indoor model railroaders, consider making a photo-realistic building or street setting:
 Hawthorne Village Update - Since 2004, fans of Hawthorne Village trains and towns have been helping support our sites both by buying collections and by sending in many questions and ideas. These, in turn, have generated new articles that a wide range of readers have found helpful - articles on scenery and construction, on making your own buildings, on the history of various hobbies and Christmas decorations, and so on. So our relationship with Hawthorne Village fans has helped many other readers over the years, and we hope it continues.
This year I took an early look at what Hawthorne Village would be offering their fans this year. I was surprised and disappointed to find that several popular collections are now sold out. For example, only a few of the Thomas Kinkade trains and towns we reviewed last year are still available. And some of the great nostalgia villages are gone - to the dismay of readers who are already asking me about them. As far as I can tell, when the economy slowed down, Hawthorne Village slowed down orders for new collections. You can say what you want about the economy, but people ARE buying again in 2011 (in fact, October sales may set a record for us). And that means that some of the best-loved Hawthorne Village collections are in short supply. True, several nice new collections have been started. But several favorites have disappeared. And these are limited edition, which means that when they are sold out, they will be gone, period.
By the way, I have houses and accessories from several Hawthorne Village collections. Some have come directly from the Bradford Exchange (their distributor), and some have come from eBay, when a piece I wanted was no longer available new. Guess what, nearly every piece I bought through eBay was missing an accessory or had a chip some where. This doesn't bother me as much as it would a true collector, since I just use them in public displays and place they're likely to get knocked around anyway, but it's worth thinking about. In other words, if there's a piece or collection you want and it's available now from Bradford exchange, don't wait too long. For more information on featured trains and towns, with links to other Hawthorne Village products, please, click on the following link:
 Musical Update to Old Christmas Tree Lights - You may recall that last year, we spent some of our web-development cycles rescuing a valuable web resource -OldChristmasTreeLights.com - from oblivion. We've been fortunate enough to get a few more updates on that site, including century-old recordings of Christmas music that we thought had been lost. If you're setting an early-1900s Christmas display or railroad around your tree this year, consider downloading some of these great wax recordings, burning them onto a CD and making your "background music" authentic. For more information, click on the following link:
 New October, 2011: Holding the Line Against Screen Spam
- Why aren't our web pages cluttered with obnoxious ads for unrelated products? Or hidden "boobytraps" that take you to unrelated sites when you click on what looks like an internal link? It's not because those companies are ignoring us.
Rather we try to avoid ads that would drive away readers. If you'd like to know how we decide what advertisements and what kinds of ads to post, click on the following link:
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. The hobby grows best when we all learn together.
In the meantime, please accept our very best wishes for a great season!
Paul Race
BigIndoorTrains.com
BigChristmasTrains.com
FamilyGardenTrains.com
To view the Trains-N-TownsTM newsletter for December, 2010, click on the following link:
http://bigindoortrains.com/trains_n_towns/10_12_newsletter_indoor.htm
To read more, or to look at recommended Garden Railroading and Display Railroad products, you may click on the index pages below.
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Announcement: Fourth Annual Christmas-Themed Open Railroad November 12