Still Chugging Along After 100 Years

Family celebrates the 100th birthday of its homemade toy train village

No toy -- other than maybe sporting goods -- could better foster father-son bonding than a toy train set.

I can remember every Christmas as a kid, my dad and me would pull out the boxes of metal tracks and miniature trains -- ones he'd passed along to me -- and start to set them up in the basement.

It seems the same goes for the McNamee family. They've been setting up the same homemade train set for the past 100 years.

Syl McNamee's father Robert, a metal worker by trade, began building his train village inside their West Philadelphia home back in 1909 and over the years transformed it into a monolith that would make any train-lover drool.

"When my father put it up, he used to leave it up until March," Syl said. "People came from all over to see this."

Robert used old materials from windows, playpens and even the roof of the family's home to build the village which includes working amusement rides, light up houses and street lamps.

"It just a cool tradition to just do," Syl's son said. "When he was doing this, was he thinking 'A hundred years from now, my great-great-grandchildren would be looking at this?'"

For the 100th anniversary, Syl added a model of his dad's favorite watering hole and live fish to the town's pond.

Check out Tim Furlong's report above for more.

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