What's running under your Christmas tree this year?

[MattR]

It's said that no Christmas tree is complete without a train running underneath it. 

 

Are you running anything under yours (if you have one) this year (2023)?

 

Are you too serious a modeler to engage in such frivolity, or is it something you look forward to every year?

 

For me, I have a 4x4 raised baseboard painted white with track glued down that the Christmas tree sits in the middle of. We then set up the "Christmas village," which is a random assortment of G-scale looking resin Victorian figures, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer figures and OO lineside buildings (station, signal box, houses, etc.) My choice of what to run is always a bit of fun and not supposed to be serious (it might cause some hard stares otherwise).

 

2021: Freelance OO9 steam locomotive with H0e Lilliput Austrian mail vans

2022: Bachmann Derby Lightweight with a Hornby lighted Pullman marshalled in between

2023: Hornby Terrier painted as a plain black industrial shunter, with three red PO wagons and the new Rapido SECR 6-wheel brake

 

Edited December 4, 2023 by MattR

[Hroth]

I did one a while ago, consisting of a Hornby "Santa Express" set, running around a small fibre-optic tree, which was controlled using an Arduino Uno to allow it to circuit in different modes*  and play a tune when it stopped at the station. However that was dismantled and I've no intention to resurrect it as since then a Christmas tree will only be erected during the week before Christmas!

 

 

* Once, once stopping and playing a tune and continuously.

[Flying Fox 34F]

I would run something, but the Cat which now lives with us, would chase and destroy it, unless it was LGB!

 

Paul

[MarkSG]

We had this a few years ago. Might evn resurrect it this year....

 

 

[MattR]

That is an awesome idea with the Wickham trolley!

[33C]

Last year it was the "Construction Express" set, as it had lights but no annoying music chip! This year, the "Dino Express"...

 

[Porkscratching]

1 hour ago, Flying Fox 34F said:

I would run something, but the Cat which now lives with us, would chase and destroy it, unless it was LGB!

 

Paul

Ditto x 3.. any trains running on the floor would be ambushed and derailed in seconds, plus the dogs would be on the scene promptly to despatch any survivors ... 

[MarkSG]

2 hours ago, MattR said:

That is an awesome idea with the Wickham trolley!

 

That was the year the Bachmann Wickham trolley was released, so I'd only just got it. We'd put the Santa train set round the tree anyway, but I had the idea to run the trolley round it as well just for the fun of it. It was my daughter's idea to put Santa on the trolley!

 

I've half a mind to do it this year with the Rapido Titfield set. 

[cctransuk]

Bah, humbug - bl**dy American idea!

 

CJI.

[The White Rabbit]

No cats or dogs currently in the house but I'd go with ... Lego. No need to worry about fluff in the motors, tight radius curves or bits of tinsel or dropped pine needles derailing the train. And it suits the mix of scales - mutant/overscale reindeer (decorations), Lego figures and Britain's farming figures and animals somehow don't look out of place. 

[MattR]

50 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

Bah, humbug - bl**dy American idea!

 

CJI.

 

It's a time-honored tradition that a lot of us can claim as the spark that inspired our love of model railways! 

 

Here's my grandfather in the late '60s with his yearly room-sized HO Christmas layout ... he always called it a "train platform".

 

 

[Nearholmer]

It is far more a US thing than British, and it seems to link back to a tradition of building Christmas model villages that was imported to the US from, IIRC, Germany through the Moravian Church, and some very clever advertising by Lionel over a century ago, but, all that having been said ……

 

I do use Christmas as an excuse to build a minor layout on the floor using LGB track, running a mixture of heavily modified LGB Feldbahn trains and scratch built things, even if the room concerned doesn’t have the Christmas tree! My daughter has hitherto been in charge of ‘set dressing’, using Playmobil figures, but she is getting all teenage now, so looks like I’m in charge of that too now for a few years.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 1, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Michael Hodgson]

7 hours ago, MattR said:

What's running under your Christmas tree this year?

 

 

As the tree's still in the loft since last year, probably a few mice !

PS   I've been told the decorations have to be put up tomorrow though, so it will probably soon be the cats!

Edited December 1, 2023 by Michael Hodgson

[Hroth]

7 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

 

As the tree's still in the loft since last year, probably a few mice !

PS   I've been told the decorations have to be put up tomorrow though, so it will probably soon be the cats!

 

This weekend is still too early!

 

(but good luck!)

 

[Michael Hodgson]

2 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

This weekend is still too early!

 

(but good luck!)

 

She says Xmas starts when she's got an advent calendar with a chocolate every morning!

[Hroth]

18 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

She says Xmas starts when she's got an advent calendar with a chocolate every morning!

 

No, no, NO!

 

Advent calendar and an Advent candle just introduce Christmas. Work your way in, listen to a few more carols every day.  Then, by about the 15th, traditionally the day when the sprouts come off the boil to a simmer, THEN you start putting the decorations up!

 

[Michael Hodgson]

Boiled sprouts!!    I wouldn't give them to the dog!

You don't cook sprouts.  You hang them as baubles from the tree!

[Steamport Southport]

 

14 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

It is far more a US thing than British, and it seems to link back to a tradition of building Christmas model villages that was imported to the US from, IIRC, Germany through the Moravian Church, and some very clever advertising by Lionel over a century ago, but, all that having been said ……

 

I do use Christmas as an excuse to build a minor layout on the floor using LGB track, running a mixture of heavily modified LGB Feldbahn trains and scratch built things, even if the room concerned doesn’t have the Christmas tree! My daughter has hitherto been in charge of ‘set dressing’, using Playmobil figures, but she is getting all teenage now, so looks like I’m in charge of that too now for a few years.

 

 

 

 

 

Definitely German in origin.

 

Probably fell out of favour in Britain in 1914 and quietly forgotten about....

[Nearholmer]

Apart from some small groups of German immigrants who adhered to the Moravian Church, I don’t think it ever came here in the first place - although displaying a simple model nativity scene is mainstream German tradition, the “putz” tradition is specific to one church, and it’s from that that the Christmas railway, and the entire Lemax mini villages thing, emerged in the US.

 

(Christmas trees are German mainstream n origin, and I’ve never read that they were boycotted post-WW1)

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Porkscratching]

3 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Apart from some small groups of German immigrants who adhered to the Moravian Church, I don’t think it ever came here in the first place - although displaying a simple model nativity scene is mainstream German tradition, the “putz” tradition is specific to one church, and it’s from that that the Christmas railway, and the entire Lemax mini villages thing, emerged in the US.

 

(Christmas trees are German mainstream n origin, and I’ve never read that they were boycotted post-WW1)

 

 

Wasn't the Xmas tree craze introduced over here largely thanks to Queen Vic and (the German) Prince Albert? 

[Nearholmer]

Popularised by him. I think Queen Charlotte (German) actually introduced it.

 

Christmas trees outside a greengrocer’s on 24 December 1918.

 

 

Apparently, Christmas Trees were on sale at Covent Garden during WW1, so no sign of them being boycotted as German n origin.

 

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Michael Hodgson]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Apart from some small groups of German immigrants who adhered to the Moravian Church, I don’t think it ever came here in the first place - although displaying a simple model nativity scene is mainstream German tradition, the “putz” tradition is specific to one church, and it’s from that that the Christmas railway, and the entire Lemax mini villages thing, emerged in the US.

 

(Christmas trees are German mainstream n origin, and I’ve never read that they were boycotted post-WW1)

 

 

Unlikely as it may seem, there's a rather pretty Moravian Church at Brockweir (a halt just north of Tintern) on the former Wye Valley line.

[Nearholmer]

It’s a very minor sect in the UK, and even at its most popular it was small. Apparently though, even when it was at its modest height, by far the majority of the adherents in the UK weren’t immigrants but local converts, so presumably didn’t carry with them a tradition of creating model villages at Christmas.

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Porkscratching]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

It’s a very minor sect in the UK, and even at its most popular it was small. Apparently though, even when it was at its modest height, by far the majority of the adherents in the UK weren’t immigrants but local converts, so presumably didn’t carry with them a tradition of creating model villages at Christmas.

 

 

Some of my "rellys" in the late 19th /early 20th cent were Germans who settled in the east end of London, there was nearby apparently a very specific "German" church (not sure if it was the mob you refer to tho) but my lot all got married and the like in the local C of E church of St George in the East, so maybe most immigrants went "English" by choice. 

[MarkSG]

Although having a working model railway runing round the tree does seem to have been popularised first in the USA, a toy train under a Christmas tree is as old a tradition in the UK as a Christmas tree itself. Here's a contemporary drawing, from 1848, of Victoria and Albert's Christmas tree that year. Look closely at one of the toys in the foreground under the tree.