Making Tracks

Both kids were playing with the train table TOGETHER last week without fighting, so I thought I would share it. I can’t take full credit for this one though, because apparently Santa and his elves made it. On Christmas morning this train table materialized in the living room, and according to Sasha Santa and his elves built it for him the night before. Why should I to correct him?

Lucky for me I work for a furniture company, and there are often table tops up for grabs. My husband has other thoughts about how lucky we are to get free furniture, because we have quite a collection. For example this table top used to be our dining room table years ago, and I have been saving it just in case it might come in handy. The size (30″x48″) was perfect for a train table. Maple veneer might be a little fancy for a train table, but it has been in operation for 6 months, and still looks like new especially considering that a number of the pieces have been torn off, and glued again. Being that we have to see the train table everyday (our playroom is open to the kitchen) I wanted something relatively inoffensive looking and we had the top and the legs so FREE is good too.

It took a little time to plan out the tracks to get all of the pieces onto the table. Once we were happy with the layout, my husband and I hot glued all of the pieces in place. Most of the buildings we had already, but we added a couple of new (used) pieces. For anyone that is familiar with Thomas & friends wooden railway you know that the pieces are stupid expensive, but I will tell you that most of the pieces came from a Chapters Indigo 50% off sale a couple of years ago, some are from IKEA and the rest came from a local used Thomas store.

It took us a couple of hours to put this together, but we have saved tons of time that we used to spend building tracks and picking up trains. Forget the store-bought train tables, grab an old table and a glue gun and get busy.