When Lionel’s shop-window attraction became the product

According to The Strong’s National Toy Hall of Fame, Joshua Lionel Cowen’s first electric train was intended as a shop-window attraction around 1900. Customers wanted to buy the little train rather than the goods it was helping to advertise.

That account places the beginning of Lionel in a shop window, before the great layouts and Christmas advertising associated with the name. The company went on to make three-rail train sets with transformers that let their owners vary the speed.

Coal cars, refrigerated wagons and boxcars gave those trains different jobs to do. The Lionel rolling stock in our museum belongs to that world of small-scale railway traffic.

Did your family’s Lionel train stay around the Christmas tree, or was there a permanent place for it to run?