Remember When: Pasteboard, balsa wood and imagination could build a village

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One thing I liked about our old model train layout at Christmas (yes, Yuletide is in the calendar’s on-deck circle) was the way the little streetlights in the town glowed in the dark.

I have no idea how that worked. But there they were – points of light in front of the church, movie theater, pharmacy, gas station and the assorted other buildings of the tabletop village.

We didn’t have the biggest Lionel train display and Christmas community in Northeastern Pennsylvania. But my father – a deliveryman for a laundry – seemed to have a gift for creating an inspiring hometown in the center of an oval of trackage.

True, I enjoyed the train with its engine that belched smoke from a pellet and its piercing whistle. But the older I get – and the more distant those days become – the more my attention wanders to the town and its masterfully constructed buildings and accoutrements.

How would you build a lilliputian movie theater anyway?

Well, if you followed his method, you’d meticulously measure, cut and glue together pieces of stiff pasteboard according to a plan in your head, supporting them with a frame of balsa wood. Of course you’d make sure the theater was in proper O gauge, the size of the train. That’s no easy task itself.

As for color, you had two choices: paint the pieces to look like brick before assembling them with glue or assemble them first and then paint them.

Avoid all that work and just buy Plasticville buildings in a kit? Not for a purist – no way!

Of course, your theater needed a marquee out front with the name of the current movie on it, along with the moniker of a star or two. Then there were the box office and, for the posters in front of the theater, a couple of tiny little pictures cut from the movie pages of the Times Leader, all realistically framed.

And that was just the theater. The pharmacy had a “Rexall” sign overhanging the sidewalk as well as show windows. The other buildings, like the church, were simpler.

The sidewalks, strips of thin wood maybe two inches wide, were covered with glittery fake snow held in place by a thin layer of glue. Of course there were utility poles with wires (black thread), and some leafless “trees” made out of gnarled and tiny twigs from our yard.

Of course, the whole shebang was placed lovingly on a big wooden table that had been disassembled and stored down cellar after last Christmas, each part identified and numbered.

The train itself – though the most expensive item of all – was close to being an afterthought.

Still, it was exciting to see and hear the engine whoo-whooing on its journey around the oval and through the mountain made of painted papier mache over a wood and wire frame and past the crossings with their flashing red-and-green signals.

These days, I wonder how many people still build living room Christmas displays on tables like our old one.

Do parents and kids still bond over the new Delaware & Hudson boxcar freshly added to the train?

Do the young’uns still wonder when they’ll be allowed to cut up pasteboard to make a little supermarket?

Do holiday guests still ask how the mountain got its boulders or the trees their barrenness?

Hey, don’t ask me! I’m still trying to figure out how those darn little plastic streetlights managed to glow in the dark.