My uncle Lou gave me an electric train for my first Christmas. I was much too young to appreciate it, of course. But I think Lou, who had a good union job operating a construction crane, was showing off a bit for his kid sister, who had married an impoverished small-town newspaper reporter.

It was a great Lionel train set. It had a gray Art Deco streamlined steam locomotive, like the ones that pulled New York Central’s crack Twentieth Century Limited passenger trains. This toy locomotive had been demoted to freight service: it pulled a yellow and blue Baby Ruth candy boxcar, an orange Shell tank car, and a bright red caboose.

By my second Christmas, Santa had assumed responsibility for setting up the train under the tree on Christmas Eve. By then I was nearly two and could delight in the colorful motion and the mournful sound of the simulated steam whistle in the locomotive’s tender. I was fascinated by seeing the locomotive headlight each time it suddenly appeared from behind the Christmas tree.

Santa’s train layouts became more ambitious with each passing Christmas - he really seemed to be into railroading. The simple circle of track became two ovals, and they were mounted on a Masonite board instead of resting on carpet. A second train appeared, a red and black electric-type locomotive pulling three orange passenger cars with interior lighting. There was an illuminated cardboard station, a crossing gate that came down each time a train passed, a stop signal, and an incongruously tall waving flagman who stood several times as high as the trains.

It was wartime and Lionel wasn’t making new trains; my family couldn’t afford to buy them anyway. All the additions were bought second-hand and then reconditioned by my father. The electric-type locomotive was from the early 1930’s, painstakingly refurbished and repainted, and the lighting in the passenger cars, caboose and station were all his handiwork.

The year after I started school, we moved to a house that had a small, enclosed sunporch. That Christmas, Santa outdid himself: on the big morning not only were there presents under the tree, but the sunporch, empty the evening before, now held an amazing train layout at table height. It had a paper-mâché mountain with little lighted houses on its slopes; one loop of track climbed the mountain, while the other tunneled through it. There was a red automatic dump car that unloaded its cargo of plastic coal at the push of a button, and a tall yellow, red-roofed coaling tower that scooped up the dumped coal and, making a terrible racket, used a chain of little buckets to hoist it up into storage. Then at the touch of another button, the coal could be discharged out a chute to a waiting car –usually the same red dump car.

It seemed that Santa was not only benevolent, but omnipotent to boot. To this day I don’t know how my father got it all done in one night. The layout must have been built in sections in the basement over many months of evenings, under conditions of heightened security. Then it was hauled up from the basement with my mother’s help and reassembled during the brief hours between putting a hyperexcited kid down for the night and being awakened early to see Santa’s bounty. It was a masterpiece of planning and execution. I strongly suspect that building this layout became an enjoyable obsession for my dad. I never asked him about it or thanked him in later years, and at the time, Santa got all the credit.

The next Christmas, the layout in the sunporch appeared overnight again, but I was a year older, and things weren’t quite the same. Even for a credulous lad like me, the whole Santa thing was starting to seem a bit far-fetched. Plus, somebody had left a copy of Model Railroader magazine lying around, and I learned that hobbyists actually built train stuff themselves rather than relying on Santa to bring it. I spent less time running the trains on Santa’s layout and more on trying to build my own boxcar out of bits of Erector set, balsa wood and cardboard. The result was rather pitiful, but my astute parents immediately picked up on the clue and got me started on HO gauge scale model railroading. Over the years my dad and I built many model kits and two unfinished layouts together (a little caboose he built still sits on my mantel), a partnership that lasted into my college days. HO model railroading reentered my life after I retired, but that’s a whole other story.

Decades later, when I was married with sons of my own, the old Lionel trains came out of mothballs and back under the Christmas tree, set up by me in full view the week before Christmas - no Santa’s miracle. Even when my sons were adults and visiting Marie and me in Kansas, these trains were always part of our Christmas tradition. The track in a dogbone-shaped layout circled the tree and tunneled through a snowy bedsheet mountain, passed by a lighted station and two illuminated houses, then traversed a long straightaway that hugged the foot of the fireplace, and finally looped around under an armchair at the far side of the room for the return trip past the fireplace to the tree.

My sons weren’t keen on running the trains, although they liked to see them go. I was the one who enjoyed them most. I loved to sit in the darkened room, lit only by the tree lights and those in the buildings beneath it, watching the trains make their winding journey. 

And I still got a little thrill every time the headlight in the gray Art Deco locomotive came into view from behind the tree.