The sign hung overhead like a cartoon word balloon. “All Aboard for an Electrical Christmas.”
The year was 1946, the start of a beloved Cincinnati tradition when the model Baltimore & Ohio Railroad trains went on display in the lobby of the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co. building at Fourth and Main streets.
This year, the holiday trains celebrate 75 years of bringing yuletide joy to Cincinnati.
For seven decades, generations of families went Downtown to view the electrical trains chugging through an elaborate scale-model town straight out of a Frank Capra film.
Some 10 million kids, young and old, watched with a mix of wonder and envy, wishing to be the engineer for one of the miniature locomotives.
The tradition began with two kids, according to a 1968 article in The Pictorial Enquirer.
In the fall of 1946, Craig Hodgetts learned from his classmate Kenny Hall about a model train layout that was owned by the B&O Railroad, where Hall’s father, Frank L. Hall, was division master mechanic. Hodgetts’ father, Edward W. Hodgetts, was director of sales promotion and merchandising at CG&E.
The layout was a replica of B&O’s Cumberland and Maryland division built in 1936 at a cost of $50,000 and used as a touring promotional display.
Young Hodgetts reportedly told his classmate, “I’ll tell my daddy about it, and you get your daddy to help.”
With the boys’ influence, CG&E and B&O partnered to make CG&E’s lobby the permanent home for the train display during the holidays. It immediately became a staple of Cincinnati’s Christmas.
While parents did their holiday shopping Downtown, kids made a beeline to see “the trains.” Bottles of soda pop and bags of popcorn were passed out to 150,000 visitors in 1950. In 2010, it was sugar cookies to 300,000.
Over the years, the display has expanded to 1,000 feet of track, with 300 rail cars, many of them handmade, and 60 engines.
“Back in 1946, they had lots of trains – 95% of our engines are from the original layout,” trainmaster Jack Thompson told The Enquirer in 2010. “But for buildings, all they had was a roundhouse, a train station, a water tank, a coal tower and an office building.”
The display has grown to be an entire town and mountain-scape with an impressive amount of detail in the snow-capped shops, ice-skating couples, a welder emitting real sparks and old-timey billboard slogans.
The O-gauge trains and models are in 1:48 scale, meaning one quarter inch equals one foot of their actual-size counterparts. So, the display’s 1,000 feet of tracks is the equivalent to nine miles.
In 2011, Duke Energy, successor to CG&E, gave the trains to the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal to make sure they would be preserved for years to come. That meant significant changes. The trains were no longer free, but they’re in a place of honor at the historic train station. One treasure housed inside another.
Holiday Junction featuring the Duke Energy Holiday Trains is open for its 75th anniversary now through Jan. 2. Lego displays have added a new twist to the tradition in recent years. This year, Brickopolis returns with Lego scenes featuring Disney, Marvel and Star Wars characters.
If that’s not enough for toy train enthusiasts, popular train displays at the Behringer-Crawford Museum, Krohn Conservatory and EnterTrainment Junction have also been making cherished holiday memories.
Note: An earlier version of this story appeared previously in the 2017 Enquirer holiday guide.
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