For some people, the aroma of Christmas is freshly baked cookies or a newly cut pine. For me, it’s the oily burn of my 71-year-old Lionel sparking across equally ancient tracks. The train is one of ...

Jerry Calabrese readily admits he's not a "fan boy" when it comes to Lionel trains; he doesn't own every locomotive, freight car or caboose Lionel ever made. But Calabrese, a Montclair resident who is ...

No one can say with certainty when the first Lionel model train was set up to chug around a Christmas tree and surprise children on Christmas morning, but it’s a safe bet that the idea and the ...

They say there’s nothing like a boy and his toys, even if the “boy” is a retired neurologist. Dr. Charles Kaufman’s toys are electric trains, which he has loved since he was a young child. “In the ...

As my colleagues Joann Muller, Zack O’Malley Greenburg and Christopher Helman reported earlier this year, the United States is heading towards its second railroad boom here at the beginning of the ...

As kids for generations have done, Landon Tennant looks longingly at a streamlined Lionel Santa Fe engine as it chugs around a tiny display with houses, mountains and bridges at TrainLand, a hobby ...

A group of people who gathered in 1994 at Chicago’s historic Union Station weren’t there to take the train. They were there to talk trains, and ended up making a bit of history themselves. It was the ...

I found this manuscript from the late John Grams in our manuscript files. There was no date on the envelope but it's likely from the early 1990s. The article discusses 12 Lionel products that, while ...

A train ride that used to delight children at Kiddytown, a small amusement park that operated in the 1950s and 60s in Norridge on land that later became Harlem Irving Park shopping mall, was found in ...