Christmas City 2011 - Updated Plarail Layout and City Lights (Part 1)

Before this post, we thought our Plarail layouts were already final. I was wrong. I came home from Hong Kong bringing some Plarail stuff not available here in the Philippines! In other news, you might want to check out the photos below! Half of the city has lights already!

The red loop as seen in the photo above costs $32 hkd. Model number of that one is the R-10. It will save you money if buy the R10 loop for making U-turns, rather than buying the normal curves. It will also require less space.

Christmas City 2011 - Railroad (Plarail) final layout [Plarail patterns]

Finally, we have finished doing the layout for the railroad. The railroad we used is Plarail, made by Tomy. From the tables below, the train climbs up to our electronic fire place. Below, you can see photos of the entire city, portion by portion.

We now have 3 train sets. 2 passenger type trains and one cargo train. The cargo train has a snow plow in front of it (to fit the Christmas theme) and we bought additional cargo cars for the train to pull. As seen in the photo above, there's a bridge. This part is the government part. This is where the town hall fire station, hospital (bank turned hospital) and police station is based. When the train goes up, it connects to the photo below...

Christmas City 2011 - Layout Testing w/ Tracks

It's already late in the evening and I just want to post an update on our Christmas City 2011 project. This week, we've spent around 6,000 pesos on the new Tomy tracks. This is the first year we encircled the whole city with Tomy tracks and bought 2 additional Tomy passenger trains.

Our Christmas City 2011 - 40% Done

Why 40% if it looks finished already?
-We haven't connected the train tracks above the fireplace yet(20%) - Very challenging since I didn't want to buy a lot of those yellow supports.
-The building have no lights yet (30%)
-Final touches and accessories (10%)

The train you can see on the tracks above (Bottom center) is from the Tomy train set I bought last year. It has a snow plow in front which can remove snow balls (seen below) as the train goes around. To make it longer, I attached 2 sets of the train body with containers. Check out the containers below.

Christmas City 2011 - New Buildings (Part 1)

Our stairs from the the top to the ground floor has garland now! Lights are actually switched on and you can feel the Christmas spirit inside the house already. Well, at least when going up and down the stairs.

As I've said in my "Christmas City Preparation blog", mom has been buying dozen of houses yearly! This year, she bought 20 new structures for our Christmas village! Since it's very hard to take note which structures we already have, we have a lot of "doubles". What we do is we sell them so we can buy other unique structures. (Interested in the doubles? email me at chef_tonio (yahoo) dot com)

Christmas City Project 2011 - Preparation

It's the -ber months again and here in the Philippines, we see traces of the arrival of Christmas as early as September. You can see local Christmas decors like parols being sold by the road, toy stores playing Christmas songs and homes being decorated with Christmas ornaments. Yes, as early as September.

Last year, we started early November. We create a Christmas city diorama yearly. My mom loves collecting those houses and we started with just 2-3 houses. A few years back, we agreed that we would only buy 2-3 houses yearly. Well, for the past 3 years, we've been buying 10-20 houses a year! Can't blame mom. She loves Christmas stuff.

This year, I think we are starting early. This year, we started on the first week of September. We already fixed the new table layout where the Christmas village/ city will be placed and I'm excited that we will be utilizing the fire place this year. Also, we bought some new items including around 10 new houses and a line up of police cars. As I was searching for police cars, my brother noticed this highly detailed British police.

Impulsively, we bought all the Mitsubishi Evo X british police made my Tomica in that toy shop that day. Tomica is one of our favorite toy car makers. This Evo X police has the number 39 in the box. This will serve as our police car for the police station from now on as we have random, no alike police cars for the past few years. Price per toy car was Php 169.00 each.

That is our city plan this year. Those gray shades are tables in different elevations. The yellow line is where the train tracks will be. Our train and tracks are from Tomy. I invested in one last year. Of course, this is not a business investment but more of a happiness investment. I loved trains since I was a kid and this is the only time that I bought one. We would be needing a huge amount of tracks this year as the set I bought last year is only good for the circular table as seen in the layout above. If only I could get a toy store here in the Philippines do an ex-deal with me hahahaha!

Snow plow train | Php 1,700.00

If you are interested to know the development of our Christmas city, check out this blog of mine. I will keep you updated.