Our train club, the Tidewater Big Train Operators, has long put on a large Holiday show that runs for eight days and every year that Archie and I have been members we have participated in it. Like everything else in this crazy year the show was cancelled. Sigh. We were not actually planning on having our own layout in the show this year, but still would have enjoyed the comradery and participating. So the Providence Township division of the TBTO decided we’d have our own little display just so the tradition would continue. Sort of.
Staying with the “pizza box” style of all the little displays we have done this year the base has been upgraded to a circle of 2″ insulating foam. The base we used for several years was made of half inch plywood that had a tendency to warp, so we had a local fabrication shop weld together a frame to go on the bottom that added the needed rigidity. It also added a LOT of weight. We are going to try these foam circles and see how well they hold up. This is the smallest of these layouts we have done, previously we used a 32″ (422mm) circle of track from a small German dealer, this is 30″ diameter that Aristocraft used to sell for their barrel layout.
The Milk and Cookies train has not been in a “show” for a couple of years and it seemed appropriate for a layout like this. We were on the lookout for something unusual to depict a train engineer or conductor and ran across this Russ Troll doll dressed as an engineer and knew it would be a perfect fit for one of our novelty trains. Except it did not actually fit anything we had. So an LGB Porter underwent a chop job, got a paint job in purple Testors lacquer and the Trolly loco was born. LGB has always advertised that all of their trains will run on the smallest radius track they make, which is a 48″ circle, but this considerably smaller than that so only an engine with a very short wheelbase will run on it. Their model of a Baldwin Porter is also physically one of the smallest locomotives they make so visually it fits in well with our tiny layouts.
Before they closed up shop Hartland Locomotive Works used to make a line of mini train cars that we frequently use as the basis for something off the wall. The milk tanker car is actually stock and we used one of the flat cars to create a table for Santa’s milk and cookies. I have no recollection of where the tableware came from, it is a child’s playset that we saw some place and thought that it could be useful and the “cookies” are 1″ scale dollhouse items. G Scale is actually closest to half inch scale, but we have found that the 1:12 things are much easier to find at our local hobby store and often time they look just fine. Running on a circle of track this small creates a lot of drag from the wheels on a train so we used ball bearing wheelsets.
Dismal Creek Railroad 