Evening all, After being forced to miss setting up a Christmas train in a local hotel display area in 2015 I was able to do so for 2016. This train is part of a gingerbread village built new each year for the Christmas season and runs from about Dec. 4 until Jan. 6. This train is in its fourth year of service. My wife took five flat cars and decorated them into several Christmas scenes. I simply make any small repairs needed and clean them up and re-grease the axles at the close of the display. It is track powered and I've used 2 or 3 different power supplies successfully. For fun I try to figure out about how far the train travels each year. This year it operated for 32 days traveling about 3 mph for about 15 hours a day. My calculator tells me it ran about 1440 miles this year. Since it is the fourth year for these cars I can honestly estimate a total a bit over 5000 miles on these train cars. That's more than any other train car or loco I have. Interestingly to me none of the cars show any signs of serious wear. The couplers are all fine, the wheels show little wear and the trucks are just fine. I used a Lil Critter that I painted up as a Christmas locomotive but it did not last more than a week before mechanical problems set in. I'll be working on it soon. I've used Egg Liners for motive power in the past and had to press one in service again this year. It ran flawlessly at all times and shows no wear at all. I think I will fir locomotive and build up one more car for next year. The nice part of this is that it gives a different track planning challenge every year and must be built up quickly and still operate with minimal or no maintenance issues. I only had to check on this one every 3 or 4 days and other than the locomotive switch there were no problems this year. It draws some very large crowds with many kids so it has to work well. Rick H.
Christmas display train layouts are fun to do. The train club my husband and I belong to does a holiday show every year in a church fellowship hall. Ours only goes for ten days though and doesn't run 15 hours a day. Congrats on your reliability. I think coming up with a new layout each year is half the fun of it.
