On this day in 1877, Joshua Lionel Cowen was born, and the toy railway got its patron saint by accident. The first Lionel train was not really a train for sale at all. It was a motorised flatcar meant to run round a shop window and make passers-by stop and look at the goods. It worked beautifully. People stopped, looked, and asked to buy the little car going round and round. The merchandise, poor thing, went unremarked.

That is my favourite kind of invention: the one that arrives sideways. Cowen went on with the Lionel Corporation to put track under a great many Christmas trees, before the war and long after it, and to teach several generations that a transformer knob is a throttle and that you are the one holding it. He died in 1965.

I have never owned a proper layout, only a loop of track and one locomotive that ran a shade fast on the straight and needed talking down before the curve. Still, I learned my signalling manners on it, and I would think of the men in the box every time I held a train at the board for no better reason than that a train ought sometimes to be held. Wikipedia has him below, for anyone who wants the full timetable of his life.