West Bend, Wi – It’s a Christmas tradition that’s garnering a lot of attention at Cedar Ridge in West Bend, WI. Residents and their visiting families are enamored with the locomotive setup by Jim Roytan, 76, who received the set from his parents in 1957.
Roytan said he was 9 years old when he received the train set for Christmas.
“We built a little setup in the basement and played with it for a while,” said Roytan. “But… then you grow up… and, you know, girls become more important.”
Roytan’s parents passed in 1995; he found the train set on a shelf in the basement of their home.
“I got the tracks to run it around a tree and my mom left a couple of homes to build a little village. Then the village expanded, and I combined the train with the village because they fit,” he said.
Roytan’s display includes two trains running on separate tracks that weave their way through the village. The black steam engine hauls a coal car and chugs along with a puff of smoke while the silver and blue streamlined engine pulls passenger cars that mirror the storyline of Polar Express.
There is a hum to the mechanics of the display; it’s a calming rhythm as the train passes through a variety of animated scenes that date to the mid-1940’s when George Bailey ran through Bedford Falls.
The village features a lot of moving parts including a family skating on a cozy hometown ice rink, hot air balloons sailing overhead, a woman buying freshly popped popcorn, two kids wrestling in the snow, and a father and his sons picking out a fresh tree for Christmas.
On hand for a couple hours a day, Roydan sits quietly in an armchair monitoring the train in motion and answering any questions.
“A lot of people who live here were actually very involved in one way or another with the railroad,” he said. “It either went by their farm or it was their only way from getting where they lived to the big city, or they had a relative that worked on the railroad. So there are a lot of memories, and I hear stories all the time. The kids are pretty speechless they just keep staring.”
Roytan said the greatest compliment he ever received was when someone said, “I’d just really like to live there.”
The train is set up in the community room on the first floor of Cedar Ridge, right off the dining area. White tufts of cotton provide the wintery scene and the trains circumvent the tracks through the bustling town.
