How many TV shows have used Lionel or AF layouts? Here are some examples I thought of;
Addams Family- This is probably the most famous TV layout. Gomez Addams would stage head on collisions augmented with explosives under his bridges.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E- Agent Napolen Solo has been captured by Thrush (again) . He is tied down to a chair facing a Lionel layout. The only controls he has in front of him are switch contollers. The Thrush people are controlling the train speed. Two trains are running on the layout, each with a load of poison gas. Agent Solo must keep the trains from colliding and thus releasing the gas and killing him as the bad Thrush guys keep increasing the train speed from the safety of an adjoining room. They stop the trains when they say they got the information they needed from another source.
The Twilight Zone- A man and woman find themselves in a really strange little town. It looks typical enough but all the trees are fake, the ground is made from papier mache’ and the houses are empty shells. There are no real people to ask quetiosn of. Finally, they hear a train whistle. They run to the station to find a train pulling in. They board it hoping to pay the conductor for the ticket to ride and get out of town. But there is no one on board. The train runs for a while and comes back to the same station it just left. The couple gets off. They look up into the sky only to see a giant little girl looking down and laughing at them. They figure out that they are on a toy train layout somewhere in …The Twilight Zone.
Captain Kangeroo- The captain did have a layout but very little is known about it.
The Today Show- I remember years ago as a kid one of the hosts ( Hugh Downs?) demonstrated a Lionel train that carried a bowl of Kellog’s Corn Flakes on a flat car. The train would stop in front of a water tower that poured milk. I have always been curious about this layout and the captain’s layout above.
“The Twilight Zone” episode “Night of The Meek”, broadcast 12/23/60 featured a Super O Lionel layout that was later used on " The Addams Family" in 1964.
Twilight zone the movie, the little boy had a lionel set in his bedroom, thier house was built on a abandon railway bed and in the middle of the night a ghost train goes crashing thru the house, stoping to pick up his granddad as he was responcible for the trains derailment on that very spot as a little boy. While not lionel or af, there were several shots of LGB trains in the movie The Santa Clause. Cheers MIke
Wasn’t the main doc in Chicago Hope Mandy Patinkin? - he’s one of ‘us’ - I’ve seen a video of his trains.
There was the Lionel TV show itself - and I think AF had one as well - or do they not count?
I remember Lionels on the Paul Winchell/Jerry Mahony Show in the '50’s, and Lionel commercials on the “Casey Jones” show starring Alan Ladd,Jr. also from the '50’s. Brrrrr ! Suddenly, I feel old ! Captain Kangaroo’s layout was a Lionel display layout (don’t know the model #, but I remember seeing the ballast tamper and the tie - jector units riding on Super"O" track. A little closer to the present (late '80’s - early '90’s) there was ALF, a puppet alien with a borscht-belt delivery that lived with a human family. You sometimes saw a Lionel layout in the garage.
Rev. Lovejoy on THE SIMPSONS has an elaborate layout in his business. He puts on his engineer’s cap and has a great time. One time, though, if I recall correctly, his wife interrupted him with some typically bad news from the Simpson family and he got so addled he set up a headon crash!
I believe that was an episode of “Amazing Stories”, the Steven Spielberg TV show from the early 80’s. And if I remember, the boys’ trainset consisted of the MPC Chessie Steam Special cars pulled by a Post War 675/2025 type engine.
Otherwise, there are too many shows to count or remember. Truth is, I have a hard time recalling any show that didn’t feature toy trains in one way or another at some point in their run.
Leave it to Beaver - June found Beavers train set and was going to give it to some younger kid in the neighborhood. When beaver took it out to clean it up for the kid he and Gilbert set it up and were running it. Beaver didn’t want to give it away now but Ward told him it was a childs toy and he was getting to big to play with trains. Beaver changed his mind and gave it away.
Cheers, my favorite show of all time, as Lionel Trains in two episodes.
The teaser (short part before the credits)… Norm and Cliff are talking about how Cliff is going to clean out the attic or some such thing and get rid of his old trains. They start reminiscing about the cattle car and before you know it they run out of the bar fighting over who gets to play with them first.
I remember this episode "A Stork Brings A Krane)… also in the teaser, Norm brings his trains and sets it up to run around the bar. Sam puts a beer on a flat car and uses it to deliver it to the customers. Norm wired in a switchtrack that automatically rerouted the train to his stool. I was always amazed the train didn’t tip over from the high center of gravity.
Long live Lionel trains… and Cheers… where everybody knows your name! [:)]
The Jackie Gleason s Show. A Lionel train comes rolling out on the bar with a drink on a flat car. Stops in front of him and he grabs the glass and takes a gulp and says " Booze goes swell with Lionel." I read someplace the brass at Lionel were not amused with that take.
I can think of several examples of toy trains on television.
Perry Mason: In the episode “The Case of The Deadly Toy” an American Flyer layout is featured. It includes a large mountain, a barrel loader and a talking station. For trains, there is a steam freight set and Super Chief Alco PA passenger set. The layout is only shown briefly and the trains aren’t run. Don’t worry-the layout is not the “deadly toy” of the title!
Seinfeld: In the episode “The Merv Griffin Show” Jerry is dating a girl who has a large collection of vintage toys she inherited from her father. Jerry wants to play with them, but she won’t let him because they are all in mint condition. Jerry (and later George and Elaine) end up drugging her food so they can play with them. The toys are displayed on a large set of shelves in her apartment. Among them are two green Lionel standard gauge passenger cars, an early Lionel standard gauge caboose and a Marx signal tower.
Matlock: There are a few episodes where you can see that Ben Matlock has some trains displayed in his office. These are a prewar Lionel crane on top of a smaller bookcase, a prewar Lionel caboose sitting on a board with a piece of track on it on a table next to his desk, an LGB Stainz 0-4-0T on a shelf on his wall bookcase and (the most easily noticeable) a G scale model of a Colorado & Southern steam engine in a glass display case sitting on top of a cabinet. The decorations in his office changed from season to season, so they weren’t always there.
Murder in Small Town X: This was the only reality show I ever liked. I wish it was still on and I could be a contestant on it! The premise of the show was that the contestants (who would gradually be eliminated) went to a small town in Maine where a serial killer was claiming victims. They would find clues and try to discover who the killer was. In one episode, two of the contestants investigated a suspect’s house while he was away and found it to be filled with toys. The
An epidode of the short-lived sci-fi series VR5 has a rather long segment where one character uses a Lionel layout to explain the difference between mechanical control and artificial or human intelligence controlling a process.
A Christmas episode of ‘Frasier’ has a train around a tree in the background during a conversation between Frasier and his dad. It was funny to notice that when the camera cut to a scene where you could see the train, it had usually been moved - as though they were playing with it between shots.
The 1990s remake of Gene Barry’s ‘Burkes Law’ has an episode, I think it was “Who killed the toymaker” and at the very end of the show, they brought out the “old” train set Amos Burke had given his son, the detective, as a child. I think it was a NYC Flyer set.
At least one episode of the BBC series ‘Monarch of the Glen’ had a large pre-war Hornby layout set up on a pool table. I never did see the episode where it was set up, though I imagine there was a small storyline about it.
