Toy Train

I've been meaning to start a project to blog about the artwork in our home. We have made a lot of the stuff ourselves... Don started making toys about 36 years ago. Cheryl and I have made more stuff for the last 13 years or so, and we have traded and/or purchased many other items made by friends at craft/art shows. These will appear in no particular order, though I think I'll start with the toys.

Today's item is a toy train that I made back in the late 1970's. It sits on a small shelf over a closet in the room I call my office at home. Made from scrap wood from the Overhead Door factory in Cortland, NY, it is 27" long. A couple of notes about this train. As with many of my early toys, it is a simple design, shapes bandsawn from the wood, with limited added detail. In this case the only added detail is a smoke stack, and 4 little peg people, and wheels of course. In the picture below, you can see that I put small pegs through the wheels into the axle to be sure the wheels stayed on. Expansion and contraction causes these pegs to slide out a tiny bit over time if the toy just sits on a shelf, but if played with, every rotation of the wheels pushes the peg in. If you click on the picture above to expand it, you can see that the peg in the front wheel of the coal car has worked its way out a bit.


Most of my work over the years has had simplicity and safety of production as a primary element of the design. In the case of this train, I totally blew it when designing the coal car. I was quite wedded to the single piece construction concept, which made the making of a hollow area for the coal a problem. My solution - while holding the cut out shape on the table of the radial arm saw, I pulled the saw out into the wood multiple times, moving the wood over a bit each time, until I had hollowed out the curved area you see in the picture below. The curve matches the diameter of the saw blade. To my credit, I had a stop on the arm of the saw so that it could not come out too far, but still! I never let anyone else do this part of the work, and while the radial arm saw bit me very well one day in 1973 or so, there was never the slightest mishap making this piece. I have lots of my old toys, but this is the only copy I have of this train. There was also a simpler 3 car train, but I don't have any examples of that one.