Get on Board, Little Children

We were talking about our favorite holiday presents. The one that came immediately to my mind wasn’t terribly original for a mid-20th century American boy: my Lionel train set.

When I say favorite, I have to qualify. I don’t remember being in a fever of wanting electric trains. Nor do I specifically recall being thrilled (though I may have been) when I tore the blue-and-gold wrapping from the oversized package that had poked out from beneath the giant cardboard dreidel that served as our Jewish Christmas tree that year. I don’t even remember loving playing with the trains, but I must have, for I remember so much about the trains themselves.

Mine was a starter set, which consisted of a circle of track, a black locomotive, a red caboose, and in between, a hopper, a tanker and a gondola.

Just setting it up offered the pleasure of fitting things together and locking them into place: To assemble the layout you inserted the pins of one track segment into the slots of another and pushed the two together. To position a car on the track you had to appreciate the way the slight concavity of the wheels enabled them to partly wrap themselves around the rails. To attach the cars to each other you had to push them together until they coupled like sweethearts clasping hands.

And then came the moment when I plugged in the transformer, heard it buzz to life, threw the switch and watched the locomotive begin to roll. By far the coolest part was turning off the lights in the room and seeing the light on the locomotive’s little nose transform the living room carpet into a lonesome prairie.

Alas, the thrill of watching a choo-choo go round the track wears off really fast. The good people at Lionel counted on your believing with all your heart that you would get it back if only you had more of everything: more track, more train, and more scenery for the train to chug through.

Over time I went from circle to oval to figure-8, added a trestle here, a tunnel there, and then, the rudiments of a little town: train station, street lamps, a house or building or two. At full build-out, my dad mounted the track on a piece of plywood that we decorated with grass that sprayed out of an aerosol can in blue-green clumps.

The danger of full build-out, at least if you’re a pre-teen boy, is that the pleasure of construction yields to the pleasure of destruction. The first crashes may have been accidents – results of running the train too fast around a curve, or forgetting to switch tracks to prevent a moving train from plowing into an idle one.

But once you see that Lionel’s trains can take a licking and keep on clickety-clacking, the urge to stage ever more spectacular disasters becomes irresistible. My friends and I gleefully piled stuff on the tracks to achieve a ball-striking-pins effect of plastic objects – people? farm animals? milk cans? — flying every which way. Or, when the plywood base sat at table height on saw horses, we balled the jack down insanely precipitous grades and around hairpin turns so that the train would fly off the tracks and into the void.

Like lots of pleasures, this one was tinged with guilt: Sturdy as the trains were, I knew I was pushing my luck. Plus it felt naughty, maybe even subversive, to use the locomotive, symbol of Transportation and Industry, as a proto-weapon of mass destruction. Though when I think of the shiny black engine lying on its side after a spectacular crash, transformer buzzing to no avail, I picture it sweating and heaving like a fatally wounded bull.

Locomotives don’t die though; transformers do. I gave no thought to replacing it. By then, even the thrill of micro-terrorism had subsided. Trains and accessories were cast aside and eventually jettisoned when we moved from a Long Island house to a New York City apartment.

Twenty years later, predictably, I wished we had hung onto it so I could have passed it on to my kids. When it came time for my son and I to stage our own orgies of destruction we used collapsing block towers and runaway Hot Wheels cars. (Clearly, putting the management of the Earth in male hands over all these millennia has been a terrible mistake.)

May there be one item under your tree today that fills you or someone you love with such memories.

Russell Frank wants to hear about your favorite holiday present. Write to rfrank@psu.edu.