Christmas and Dad’s Toy Trains

He made his living updating the interior and exterior colors of upper class folks’ homes. To them he was known as Al the house painter; back home he was simply known as Dad.
I have many memories from my youth that drift leisurely through my brain like a skiff on a pond during a warm summer’s day, but none of those thoughts can resonate as strongly as those that come to me during the holiday season.
Christmas in my family’s home wasn’t very different than it was in many of my friends’ households at that time. While walking along the blocks upon blocks of row homes in my Philadelphia neighborhood that lined up like toy soldiers from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker Suite,’ one could find thousands of oversized, colored-glass lightbulbs draped around the railings and stapled around plastic, popcorn Santa’s and snowmen in a dizzying array of rainbow colors.
Carolers could be heard joyously singing as the chorus of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” fittingly cut through the hushed, muted sounds of gently falling snow flurries. Once inside my living room, I would take my jacket and hat off as I passed by our faux fireplace which held our stockings, greeting cards and a small, wooden nativity scene.
The coalescing of wonderful smells that would overwhelm the senses, such as the scents of peppermint candy canes, cinnamon candles, Mom’s amazing homemade cookies, and our freshly-cut pine tree, which was waiting oh so patiently to be decorated on Christmas Eve, seemed to be something that simply could not be bettered.
There was, however, one treat that my brother and I couldn’t get enough of that came roaring to life every holiday season.
Our excitement could barely be contained as we watched them zoom past us over and over again on the simple loop of three-railed track that encircled our red-and-green steel tree stand.
My earliest recollection is of two particular sets that were from my father’s youth. The first train set that I can recall was an American Flyer ‘Royal Blue’ locomotive and matching tender that chugged along towing a burgundy boxcar, green gondola and a whimsical little red caboose.
The second was a Lionel set that consisted of several silver ‘Zephyr’ passenger cars that were robustly pulled by a mismatched, brown, pre-war designed engine.
Initially these trains scared me when I was a very young boy as they would throw off tiny dancing sparks between the wheels and track that surely meant I would be electrocuted if touched. Luckily my fears would soon subside as my father taught me about the low-voltage track and how to properly set up the miniature railroad. 
Even with such an initial scary threat looming, I loved them so.
That smell. Electric toy trains tend to give off a scent once they have been running for a short while, especially after the long layoffs between holiday usages; I had come to learn many years later that the smell was ozone that came from arcing of the brushes and wheels as the trains went around the tracks.
The scent would tend to give me a slight headache at first, but the absolute joy of watching those little engines haul their brightly colored cattle cars, flat cars and hoppers was all the medicine that I would ever need. I loved that my father let me control the dials of the large, ebony plastic-coated transformer that would make the weathered, charcoal gray locomotive screech around the track.
As a ‘tween, I had gotten my first HO-scaled train set for Christmas. I was now able to emulate my dad and have my own layout right next to his.
We both had green carpeting that covered one end of our plywood sheet foundations to the other. We had tiny plastic houses and stores, hospitals and police stations, watchman shanties and signal bridges, and even a little canary-yellow Frosty ice cream stand to cool the palettes of our miniature plastic soon to be passengers.
By now my father was running his Pennsylvania GG-1 locomotive and I would power my Union Pacific Silver Streak diesel engine. I was now running my railroad neck and neck with…
During my teen years I had more or less forgotten about those joyous plastic-and-tin gems. Music and girls preoccupied my mind as I was making the awkward transformation from being a boy to becoming a man. 
On my walls were then-popular rock band posters such as Van Halen and Ratt, as well as photos of cute girls of whom I was crushing on at the time.
My father seemed to realize this and as each year passed, the trains came out less frequently until they eventually stopped making their colorful appearances altogether. I wouldn’t realize back then how much I would miss those innocent years until much later on in life.
As I reached adulthood and would eventually have a little one of my own, my son would soon realize the tradition that I had as a child when I started setting up a few oval shaped tracks around our Christmas tree.
Although the Plasticville town was now a ceramic Christmas village, and a blanket of soft, fuzzy ‘snow’ had long since replaced the green carpeting, the trains would still bring a smile to my face as well as those in my family. The little railroad display would remind us all of…
It was on Valentine’s Day 2007 that I received the phone call from my brother. Dad had passed away. On the fireplace mantle stood a solitary card and a bouquet of flowers, dark red roses sprinkled with Baby’s Breath, which had only a few hours earlier been given to my mother, his loving wife of almost 40 years.
A few weeks after the funeral my mom and brother gathered up some items in an old brown corrugated box to give to me. It was a bittersweet moment as my father’s miniature railroad had become something I had never thought about owning in my carefree days as a young man. These pint-size iron horses were now to become…
My toy trains.
As I find myself discovering new flecks of gray in my whiskers and more pronounced wrinkles on my face, I observe my own son as he rapidly approaches adulthood. I can’t help but ponder when the time will come that all of those wonderful Christmas memories that we have shared together around our train layout, such as unwrapping gleaming silver and gold foil covered packages, conversing with current and long lost friends and relatives, or watching Frosty and Rudolph reruns on the television, will soon become a sweet nostalgia for he and his future sons or daughters as one day they, too, will appreciate what will become his.
Dad’s toy trains.
James writes from Rio Grande.