Holiday train set clicks with all ages

A 10-year Everybody?s Whole Foods? holiday tradition brings smiles to customers, employees and business owners alike.

The Fairfield grocery store, has ?decked the halls? and then some. Co-owner Paul Praither displays part of his toy trains collection just inside the store?s entrance.

?Growing up [in Kentucky] I had trains,? said Praither. ?My dad was really into trains and we had a train room in our home.?

Two of the six trains chugging along the circuit of tracks in the store are Praither?s from childhood years. All of the trains are his, acquired at various times.

?I have more upstairs, in storage,? he said. ?There?s not enough room to bring them all out.?

The current display looks larger than a pingpong table and has three layers of train tracks, villages and winter scenery. A clear enclosure/guard is just high enough to keep most small hands out, to avoid injuries and derailments.

?It takes about three weeks to get it all set up,? said Praither, ?We can?t devote full time to it. This year we started on it the week before Thanksgiving. We usually leave it up through the first or second week of January.

?The best thing about it is the reactions,? said Praither who wore an apron and worked a cash register alongside his employees Thursday morning. ?We see kids come in, their eyes open wide, they get excited and can stay up there watching the trains a long time. And from the older people, we get to hear their train stories from their childhood. Everyone has a train story. So this works for everybody.?

Praither delegates responsibility for the trains to employees. Jim Cassidy built and assembled the display with artistic, creative help with the scenery from Laura Koelblinge this year. Two Erics ? Hannes and Hurlin also help.

Eric Hannes, who started work in the store last spring, has taken on the daily job of starting the trains each morning.

?First, he has to clean the tracks,? said Everybody?s co-owner John Dey. ?You wouldn?t think the tracks could get dirty, but the metal must degrade a bit.?

Hannes spends an hour each morning with rubbing alcohol, wiping down the tracks for smoother running of the railroads.

?I also oil the axles on the engine car of each train,? he said. ?We have controls for each train, and I set each one to a certain speed so they don?t derail on the curves and corners. It?s a lot of fun.?

Dey admits if it were solely up to him, the trains would not get set-up.

?It?s a lot of work, but once they?re up, I do enjoy the trains and think it?s a wonderful idea,? he said. ?You can tell the emotional age of those responding to the trains. It stops some people in their tracks!?

Praither said all of his trains are G gage.

?We do have train engineers come in and ask us,? he said, laughing. ?They already know the answer, but they want to see if we do.?

This is the first year the train display moved from the west side of the store to the east side.

?Now we have more room on this side,? said Dey, indicating the produce section that also shifted with a remodel during the past year. ?But every year, there?s probably a slight difference in the display. We may find a different track placement that works better or whatever.

?If I could can this feeling, and have it around all year, I would,? he added.