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December, 2014 Update from Family Garden TrainsTM
Note: This is the web version of a newsletter from the Family Garden TrainsTM web site, which publishes information about running big model trains in your garden as a family activity.
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In this Issue
Well, Christmas is fast upon us, as the Victorians would say. We're doing Christmas things already like caroling and running Christmas trains with lights in the trees. The latter forced us to do a lot of work on the railroad in a hurry (between leaf-falls and snowfalls), so our report on the event is also full of last-minute preparations.
Of course this is a time that a lot of "non-train" people start thinking about trains. Be sure and "be there" for your friends who have questions. In fact we've built a whole family of web pages because of readers who had questions. 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, the folks we've helped get started in Garden Railroading number in the thousands by now.
Quite a few folks have e-mailed me in the last several days saying they plan to start a railroad this spring. A number of others plan a significant expansion. If you get snowed in this winter, or you didn't get enough building kits for Christmas to take all your spare time, you can benefit by reading - or rereading - our planning articles. Click the following link to go to that index page.
In the meantime, please have a wonderful holiday and a prosperous New Year!
Topics discussed in this update include:
 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:
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, 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.
Toy Train Hint - EzTec "G Gauge" Trains
 Here's something you'll almost never see us bring up - a note about a toy train that doesn't ENTIRELY suck. Every year it seems like the battery-powered toy trains that are sold in department stores at Christmas get worse and worse. New Bright, which used to nearly own that market, has disappointed a lot of folks because replacement parts are not available. But most other companies don't even exist - they're just brand names slapped randomly on imported toys made by the lowest bidder. Some folks think I am bigoted against anyone whose trains don't cost $200 a set or more. But I really just don't like the fact that that these flimsy toys cause so much disappointment every Christmas. Families are lucky if they work at all, and very lucky if they work the next time they get them out of the box. Based on such experiences, millions of families have decided that trains are a waste of money and never experience the joy and play value a decent train set can bring.
In this vast wasteland, one manufacturer is an exception. Scientific Toys' EzTec makes toy trains, don't get me wrong. But they are also a real company, and they even sometimes have replacement parts available. If you want to get a battery powered toy train this season, note that the "G gauge" EzTec trains are the best of the bunch. Some years they aren't made at all, so seeing two available this year was a welcome site.
One example that has appeared in hardware stores, discount stores, grocery stores, and many other places this year is the EzTec North Pole Express "G Gauge" train.
Another that appears less frequently, but may be more appealing to some is the Silverado Express 
On the web version of this newsletter, I embedded links to these trains on Amazon so you could see what they look like. But DON'T BUY THEM ONLINE. Both trains shown will be cheaper if you can find them in the store. Also, if you're not really looking for a train to put around the tree and your store has overstocked these, they may discount them up to 50% after Christmas.
The other reason to buy these in person is that EzTec also makes smaller versions that are not quite as useful for most families, and the online vendors that sell these mix them up all the time. You might open your UPS package to discover that you spent $80 to buy a train you didn't want and that you could have got for $30 at your neighborhood appliance store.
Once again the Lionel Battery Powered "G Gauge" trains are a step up from these, and the track powered O or Large Scale starter sets by Bachmann and Piko (above) are much, much better than any of the battery powered trains that are widely available this year. However quite a few friends who own better "G gauge" trains have bought these for their grandkids to play with, and nearly as many who want to run Large Scale trains but can't afford the expensive sets have figured out how to make these work.
Keep in Touch
Finally, please let us know about your ongoing projects. Ask questions, send corrections, suggest article ideas, send photos, whatever you think will help you or your fellow railroaders. In the meantime, enjoy your trains, and especially enjoy any time you have with your family in the coming weeks,
Paul Race
FamilyGardenTrains.com
To view the newsletter for November, 2014, click on the following link:
To read more, or to look at recommended Garden Railroading and Big Indoor Train products, please click on the index pages below.
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