Oh, let me tell you about the Lionel Train Corporation! I said the Lionel Train Corporation! Yes sir! Yesss sirrrrr! Yesssssssirrrrrrr!
I’m talking about the dream factory, the toy train Mecca, churning out those glossy little marvels of American ingenuity in Hillside, New Jersey. Ages ago, and I mean ages ago, my great-grandmother — whom I never met, whose name, I hate to admit, I don’t even know — worked there. She was an administrative assistant, or whatever secretaries were called back then. What matters is this: she was there, in it, during the golden age of Lionel.
Picture it: the factory humming, buzzing, bursting with life and steel and imagination, 2,000 workers strong. At its peak, this wasn’t just a place to make trains; it was an engine of wonder. Those sleek, smoking locomotives of childhood fantasy came pouring out, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, the post-war boom years when toy trains were the status symbol under the Christmas tree.
My great-grandmother got a discount on those trains — a perk of the job, a touch of insider magic — and one day, sometime in the early to mid-1950s, she used it to gift my mother a Lionel model 2055. Oh, what a piece of machinery! Of technology! Of mid-century American ingenuity! Magnetraction to grip the rails like a panther, a three-position E-unit that clicked with satisfying authority, a headlight that cut through imaginary fog, a whistle that made you feel alive, and a smoke unit! A smoke unit! It wasn’t just a toy; it was a portal to another world.
That train became a family heirloom, of sorts. My mother, as a child, saw it circling her Christmas tree, and so did I, years later. It was always there, until it wasn’t. Time, that insatiable devourer of all things, came for it. One year it stopped working, and down it went, banished to the basement, where it became coated with wood shavings, spray paint overspray, and all the sad, suburban detritus of deferred dreams. There it sat for decades, gathering not just dust and dirt and grime, but a kind of poignant, unspoken neglect.
But I, well, I have a penchant for lost causes and dusty relics, and few months ago, I decided it was time. I went to my parents’ house, descended into the cool, musty gloom of the basement, and found it: the old Lionel train set. I dusted it off as best I could, carried it home like a knight retrieving a relic from the ruins, and began the restoration.
The transformer? Fixed. The tracks? Well, they were beyond repair, so I replaced them. The locomotive itself? It’s still fairly dirty, but presentable, and restored to working order. I was cautioned by the company doing the restoration that I was “putting more into this than it’s worth.”
But what did he know? He didn’t understand. How could he? You can’t price four generations of memories. You can’t slap a dollar value on the thrill of seeing that headlight beam or the soft chuff of smoke rising once more. This wasn’t about market value; it was about history, family, the small but indelible threads that bind us to something larger than ourselves.
I don’t know why I do this, restoring old things. Maybe it’s a rebellion against the throwaway culture of today, an act of defiance in favor of permanence and legacy. Maybe it’s an attempt to touch the past, to feel a flicker of an era when families gathered around toy trains instead of glowing screens. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because deep down, we all need restoration. There’s something especially Christian, in the truest sense of the word, about it.
And so it was especially gratifying when I, this year, put the old train around my new tracks under my own Christmas tree, and I watched that little locomotive chug away again, clickity clack, clickity clack, and I felt it: the wonder, the magic, the uncontainable joy of a child on Christmas morning.
Why the heck not?
