LEBANON, Pa. â When this holiday season rolls around, youâre likely to find a Christmas tree with not just gifts under its boughs, but also a model train encircling its base. Itâs easy to understand the symbolism behind putting a star at the top of a Christmas tree and the gifts beneath, but how did that model train find its way into holiday tradition? The link between trains and Christmas dates to mid-19th-century Germany, where the hand-carved wooden villages placed beneath their decorated holiday trees began including carved wooden trains.
How Model Trains Became a Christmas Staple
Later, a New York City inventor named Joshua Lionel Cowen inadvertently popularized model trains at Christmastime in America. According to Wikipedia, at age 7, Cowen had made his first toy train by adding a small motor to a model of a railroad flat car.