Felt Train Scene

I saw this toy for sale last year and it has stuck in my head because it is so incredibly gorgeous. It is called the PepeTo and it appears to be a Czech toy made on demand, like you could order one track and indicate what you want it to look like. Please check out their site because it is so cool.

This is the Czech train toy that I love.

Anyway it made me think about our own wooden train set, so rarely used. Maybe for Christmas I could make a little line of tracks with backdrops and put it on my mantle.  The one I am totally copying has two sides of houses and trees and stuff going alongside the track. I thought it might be easier to actually play with the train if you only have one side of decorations. I decided to make simple felt house and tree and candy cane shapes. You could do a lot of other things with your landscaping like have it be the North Pole or even specific cities like have the Golden Gate Bridge or stuff people would recognize. But for me, simplicity won.

Materials

• white poster board
• scissors
• duct tape
• wooden train pieces
• felt scraps in assorted colors
• paper clips
• pencil or pen

Steps

1.  Trace the train track piece onto a piece of white poster board and cut it out.
2. Draw sone outlines of buildings, churches, candy canes, etc and cut them out
3. Glue felt on top of the poster board shapes and trim around the edges.
4. Use duct tape to attach the buildings and other shapes to the side of the white track base
5. 'Straighten a paper clip and add that to the back and the underside of the track for greater stability.
6. Repeat.

Since I was already working with cardboard and felt I also made some stand alone buildings to either go behind the train set or stand alone as perhaps a little Bethlehem. I feel like the buildings in Bethlehem would be really basic structures and maybe a few cupulas but mostly simple