|
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.
- 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.
- 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
Yes, I know, some of you were wondering if we had gone away for good. It has been a whole year since our last newsletter. We have been working furiously on the BigIndoorTrains.com site and its related pages, just not doing anything that shows, or frankly, benefits anybody but our hosting and service providers.
 Since December, 2015, we have had to make several massive, expensive, and time-consuming upgrades to our hobby sites JUST to keep them available and working as well as they did a year ago. I felt a little like Alice when the Red Queen told her ". . . here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Rendering to Caesar, More or Less - One of the changes we were forced to make was from Amazon, whose advertising helps offset the cost of running our sites. They demanded that we include a "disclaimer" on every web page that we earn money by "advertising and linking to amazon.com." We've said very little about this sort of thing in the past, but since Amazon has required us to update thousands of pages, we don't feel bad about explaining what that actually means, and how you can help support our site at no cost to yourself. There are a couple of paragraphs below that explain just that.
New Home and Very Old Trains - Here's a bit of personal news which will affect all of my hobbies - we're moving. The new house has a large garage with an extra bay I plan to use for my hobbies. I have NOT had room for an S gauge railroad for over forty years. But sometimes I miss my old Flyer. In fact this month's title photo is of my tabletop S gauge railroad when I was in high school. Sorry it's not clearer, but, hey, it was a free fixed-focus camera I got with cereal box-tops or something. My sister's Docksider is in the foreground. Above it is a #292 USRA-inspired Pacific that I repainted and detailed (somewhat), including the hand rails you can see. To the left are two locomotives I especially miss - the PRR 0-6-0 with the slopebacked tender and the PRR K-5 Pacific, a very solid performer. Not shown is my first Flyer locomotive, the Reading Atlantic 303, with its "pregnant firebox." To this day the sight of a Reading or Belpaire firebox on a locomotive brings back a flood of memories. Come to think of it, so does the smell of an AF transformer overheating. :-)
I still have a few Flyer pieces and a loop of track, but, depending on how things work out at the new house, I might be shopping for Flyer and Plasticville at the next train show. Then there's that old Lionel set I've only been setting up for open railroads . . . .
New Boston and Donnels Creek Comes Out to Play One Last Time - Usually my November newsletter includes at least one article about my Christmas-themed open garden railroad. We would put lights over all the trees, set up several toy trains for the kids to run, put Christmas-themed trains on my "permanent" railroad, play Christmas music, pop popcorn, and set out snacks. That didn't happen this year, in part because we were supposed to have been moved by now (we started the process in May). But we had a wedding in the family, and the bride wanted to have the rehearsal dinner at our old house "for old times' sake." And our grand-newphews on that side of the family hadn't been up to see the trains for years. So we brought back some of the buildings (which had already been moved), brought back Thomas and James, cleared the track, and ran trains for the evening. Two little boys, at least, were very excited. That story is also below.
Topics discussed in this update include:
 The Last Hurrah!
After almost seventeen years of operation, the New Boston and Donnels Creek railroad has shut down. We hope to rebuild in a lower-maintenance iteration at the new place (probably starting in the spring of 2017). But when our daughter asked to have the rehearsal dinner for her wedding at the "old place," we weeded and cleaned off the tracks again, and brought some trains, buildings, and people back to set up one more time. Someone else called the big feed at our house "the last hurrah," but I include the railroad in that. It certainly held the attention of the youngsters who attended. Until the food was ready, that is.
A longer description of that event is here:
 Test Your Trains Early
Here's a tip I try to share every year at this time: If you only have one train, and you're going to set it up in December, test it now. Every year, starting in early December, I get deluged with e-mails from anxious, upset folks whose train set doesn't work when they set it around the tree. Trust me, the train manufacturers' repair departments are already working overtime by Thanksgiving.
Nobody with a cherished old heirloom wants to hear that the only way they'll have a train around the tree this Christmas is to buy a new one, but that happens. Because I write articles and do clinics, etc., I have backups, and backups for my backups, so this isn't generally an issue for me, but not everybody on the list has too many trains.
Don't Wait Too Long to Order Trains
Here's a quick recap of where you can see train reviews in our Buyer's Guides. Starting about Thanksgiving, the remaining trains tend to go fast. Though I'm usually pretty good at guessing which trains will be in high demand every year, the ones that I expect to be slow sellers sometimes sell out first and the ones that I think will sell out first are still around next year. So the moral is, if you have your eye on some specific train, please order it soon to avoid disappointment.
In fact, one Lionel train I specifically chose to highlight in this newsletter sold out between the time I started the newsletter and the time it was ready to publish (about six days). The moral - as always this time of year - is "Don't wait too long."
 O Gauge Trains in Railroad Names - If you click on the Amazon link for a Lionel train and it is low or out of stock, be sure to scroll down and see the "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" section, in case new trains have been added.
To see the Lionel trains that are painted for PRR, NYC, UP, GWR, and other "real-world" railroads, click the following link:
 O Gauge Trains in Christmas Colors - Last year, Lionel offered more trains decorated for Christmas than they have ever offered at one time. This year not so much. Several of last year's nice sets are still available for now, though.
Click the following link to see Lionel's Christmas-Themed O gauge offerings:
 On30 Trains in Christmas Colors - Hawthorne Trains used to order specially painted On30 train sets from Bachmann to sell in "collections."
These come one piece at a time, except in some cases you can order a "super saver set" in which the first three "issues" come in the first shipment, and after that, the subsequent pieces come one at a time. However, most of the original On30 collections are no longer offered, and they really are among the finest model trains you can buy for your holiday village, etc. To see which collections are still available, click the following link:
 On30 Trains in Railroad Names - On30 is a great size for running with holiday villages, and it's a fun scale to model in regardless. Click the link below and scroll down to see the links for those products.
 Large Scale Trains in Christmas Colors - These are perfect for big displays in bank lobbies, etc. And they are "jaw-dropping" around the tree.
To see the Large Scale trains that are decorated for Christmas, click the following link:
 Large Scale Trains for Kids - There are several trains that work as well under the tree or on the bedroom floor as they work outside.
To see Large Scale trains that are designed to be kid-friendly, click the following link:
 Large Scale Trains in Railroad Names -
To see the best currently-available recommendations, click the following link:
 Hawthorne Village HO Sports Trains -If you've wanted to start collecting one of these sets and you've been putting it off, you should check now to see if your favorite team is still available. Several teams are not.
To see the sports trains that were available the last time I went through the list, please, click the following link:
How do Vendor Links Help Our Sites, and How You Can Help, Too
Back when we started our first train site (1999), other sites were asking for money to see most articles, but we just wanted to help folks getting into the hobby, so we offered all the information we could put together or track down free to all readers. It still is. What we have NOT done is fill our pages with obnoxious popups or ads for unrelated products.
By keeping the ads in the margins and keeping most product recommendations and reviews on separate pages, you should be able to read each article the way you would read a magazine page, and not be constantly trying to figure out how to get around obnoxious ads for unrelated products. I hope you appreciate that.
Now here's the part where I explain how we make money from the links and ads we do post. If you click on an ad or product link, and buy something on that visit, we'll get a small percentage of what you pay for the product. If you click on one thing and buy something else on that visit, we get the same percentage. We've gotten "commissions" for some pretty strange things that way.
On the other hand, if you decide not to buy the product we told you about yet, but later you see in pop up on Facebook or Weather.com tomorrow and click on it then, we get nada.
Let's be fair - you learned about the product from us. And who deserves the commission more - a site that helps you make good decisions and keeps the advertising down to 3% or so, or a site that just picks up the "cookies" that the vendor has left on your computer, while they're also bombarding you with dozens of other ads?
We could get real greedy and ask you to go through our sites even when you're shopping for totally unrelated stuff. But that wouldn't be fair. Still, when it comes to products you first learned about on our site, we will ask that you "dance with him as brought you," as the old-timers say. Simply come back to the site where you saw the thing in the first place (even if it isn't us). It costs you nothing, but should help us keep things going indefinitely.
Or we could ask for money.
No, I like the way we're doing things now better. :-)
If you love your classic trains and would like to see them surrounded by classic buildings and accessories, but don't want to cash in your 401k, here's a reminder that you can get that look with a color printer, some acid-free paper, and a sheete of posterboard. Our "Tribute to Tinplate" pages have plans for several classic buildings, as well as lithograph-inspired patterns you can use to make buildings of your own design. Several tinplate-collecting friends have really "fleshed out" their tinplate railroads with these resources, And except for lack of rust, most folks would never know the difference.
Click the following link to see some examples.
Also, if you miss the rust, you can always "dust" the buildings with a can of red primer when you're done. :-)
Speaking of cardboard, if you love those little cardboard villages folks used to set up on the coffee table or around the tree between 1926 and 1970, they're still around. Not only are people collecting them, but they are building both replicas and new versions that are stunning in their creativity and beauty. About 2006, I start posting articles about them in the BigIndoorTrains.com primer pages, not knowing how popular they would be come eventually.
In 2010, "Papa" Ted Althof, the biggest proponent of collecting these houses, was becoming too ill to keep his web site going. Since I had made some good friends in the hobby, I set up the Cardboard Christmas site to keep the hobby moving forward should the worst happen. In 2011, I set up a discussion forum so my friends could share photos, etc. For about a year, it was a sort of private club, with only a handful of - frankly - handpicked people contributing. Then other folks started coming onboard, and bringing their ideas and projects with them. There are now over 7000 posts on over 1000 different topics, and many, many of those posts included photos, ideas, patterns, and instructions.
For a time I thought I'd index the plans and suggestions for people just coming into the forum, but the site got out of my control in a hurry. Which is a good thing, because if its progress and growth depended on me, it would still be where it was a year ago. In fact, I've been so tied up with behind-the-scenes maintenance that I haven't even been able to process new signups for about ten months. My apologies if you are one of the people in the queue. I hope to get going on that some time after Thanksgiving, but we'll see.
Click the following link to jump to the forum page and see what's happening in this newly reinvigorated hobby.
If you want to go to the BigIndoorTrains.com pages that spelled out the first few dozen projects, mostly designed by "glitterhouse" guru Howard Lamey, click 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. 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 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, 2015, click on the following link:
http://bigindoortrains.com/trains_n_towns/15_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.
|
|
Reminder for Tinplate Lovers
Cardboard Christmas House Reminder