A toy train for the holidays

What this Christmas needs is a good electric train set.
Did you see the remake of “Holiday Affair” on TV? The original starred Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh and Wendell Corey. It was about a war veteran working in a department store toy department. He sells an electric train to a young widow who is working as a comparative shopper. She secretly learns the prices of items being sold in competing stores for the department store that is her employer.
Robert Mitchum loses his job as a result of the transaction and, naturally, ends up marrying the lady who has a cute little boy and a lovesick suitor (Corey).
The gimmick at the beginning and end of “Holiday Affair” was the toy train, a big-selling Christmas item when the movie came out in 1949.
So, when the revised movie came on TV Wednesday night, I had to see if it had a train. It does! A beautiful Lionel passenger train that runs over mountains and dodges through tunnels, just like the train displays at our local Sears store in South Bend during the month of December. Wow, I miss Christmas toy trains.
We have a little, battery powered plastic toy train we run around the Christmas tree each year, but it just isn't the same.
One reason kids probably don't ask for toy trains any more is the price (and the competition from video games, yeah, yeah).
As I recall, in the 1949 “Holiday Affair”, the train cost less than $200. In the new movie, it costs more than $1,200. Considering the new movie was made at least 50 years after its namesake, the price is probably very reasonable. But, can you buy Lionel train sets from any department stores any more?
They used to sell them at a craft store in Terre Haute, along with the big G scale trains and the tiny HO and smaller trains. The store still has the Lionel sign posted, but I don't think they carry the items any longer.
One of the reasons toy trains have gone by the way side is that the small trains became models and gradually lost their toy designation. You can find “Model Railroader” and other magazines devoted to building realistic looking train layouts in any bookstore. But try to find “Classic Toy Trains” magazine and you had better just go to the Internet and do a Google search. That's what I did.
"Classic Toy Trains" magazine caters to Lionel and American Flyer afficionados.
The difference between toy trains and model trains is in the attention to scale and detail. A toy train may have a whistle; it usually has a tunnel and may have signs and a billboard (the whistle was built into the billboard on my old American Flyer layout).
But model trains are usually built to depict the real world; a specific time and place. And that's OK if you care about that sort of thing, but I just love to remember watching those shiny new, beautifully colored toy trains go round and round on those layouts in the Sears Toyland at South Bend.
After reading an ongoing debate in a model railroad magazine, an old timer hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “Why can't we just hook up a transformer to a circle of track on the living room floor and play trains with our grandkids?”
Hurrah for toys trains and hurrah to RKO pictures for keeping the toy train in their remake of “Holiday Affair”.