Christmas Villages Online

There’s nothing like the finished look that a Village with its own train provides! All of the Villages have train stations, and the clever Village Nut will tap into the model railroad train world for inspiration on train sets and the terrain around them. See the right sidebar for some great books & videos that will help you along. The Bachmann White Christmas Express is a good choice for some Villages.

When I first decided that my Village needed a public transportation system, I started to look at model railroad sites. The first thing I needed to know was what size train would look best with my Village – a big one that looks more proportionate to the people and buildings, or a smaller one that wasn’t to scale but was more available and cheaper. Holy Smokes! I thought this would be relatively easy, but I got hit in the face with terms like gauges and scales. I had no idea what these terms meant, and was frustrated by what I thought was an unnecessary amount of technical talk. I just wanted a nice little train for my Village! I didn’t want to become a model railroader.

So, after I got hit on the head with a brilliant idea… just as Village Nuts put together pieces and accessories to please themselves rather than because they all belong to the same Village, I thought why don’t I just get a train that I like and to heck with the scales and gauges! So I did, and I ended up buying a Christmas Train from Bachman. For the record, it was in HO scale… This is the scale that Dept. 56 uses in their Village displays.

For those of you who’d like a little more technical info, I’ll just give you a bit. There are two main size references used in model railroading. The first one is Gauge, which is the space between the train track rails. The second is Scale, which is the proportion that the item is to it’s real-life counterpart. For example, a 1:1 scale means that the item is life-sized. You definitely aren’t going to be putting one of these in your Village!

If you want to have a realistic display, then you want to have your train and Village items in roughly the same size category. For those who are more flexible, and less concerned with realism just forget all this stuff and have at it! I’ve found that most Villagers I know like the O scale, particularly for larger pieces like in Snow Village. O scale trains are the most popular ones out there so the selection is good. HO scale trains come in a variety of sets, including quite a few Christmas-decorated sets. But this size tends to fall off the tracks easily and is a pain to put back on. There is also a scale that a lot Villagers like called ON (which I believe stands for O-Narrow).

This website has a lot of information on trains and incorporating them into your village, from a train buff’s perspective: Click here for great display & train info. There are also some excellent photos of different sized trains with various buildings and accessories to give you some perspective.

The grand-daddy of model trains, Lionel, has the license to make a Harry Potter train that’s just out now! Woooo-hooooo! Click here to get your Harry Potter train.

As an FYI, I’ve found that model railroaders are SUPERB reality-creators in their train displays. If you’ve ever gone to a train store, you’ve seen the most amazing variety of realistic terrain and landscaping items you’ll ever see. Small bags of rocks of every size and color, fake grass that looks better than the stuff in your lawn, cinders to go around the tracks, dirt, trees, shrubs – you name it.

Here’s a great video of a multi-village display, complete with trains and Christmas music! It’s wonderful – enjoy!

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