Maybe 10 days before Christmas, my father closed off access to the cellar playroom his six children normally owned and occupied. It was an open secret: He was building the Christmas garden, that Baltimore tradition that can involve electric trains, scraps of plywood, sawdust, paper (for imitation mountains), little houses, and a very elementary knowledge of wiring and circuitry.

My father, who covered thoroughbred horse racing for this paper and others, was not what I think of as a home DIY guy. He was more comfortable having a cup of tea (often stirred with a knife) and solving a crossword puzzle.

He worked long days, commuting as he did to Bowie, Marlboro, Hagerstown, Laurel or Delaware Park — or his beloved Pimlico, where they put his name on the press box.

Much later in his life, I learned that he was a closet train fan. I knew he was fascinated by the toy electric train variety, but over time, he revealed that he was an accomplished real train connoisseur too.

Old-fashioned Baltimoreans abhor traveling. When handed an assignment to go to Monmouth Park, New Jersey, for the opening of a new racetrack, he packed it all into one day. He found a train that would place him back in The Sun’s old Baltimore and Charles building the same day or early the following morning.

He delighted that the old Havre de Grace track had its own direct access railroad siding so he could return to Baltimore in less than a half hour. His eyes lit up when he’d describe a dining car breakfast going to Delaware Park on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He’d confer with the car’s waiters and mark their race programs with his picks for the day.

But come Christmas, he became our home’s de facto electrician. This was not his natural calling. I never saw him so disconcerted as when he put the lights on the tree. He did not actually cuss. He just boiled over with frustration as cords tangled and the old series-style bulbs misbehaved. He was not a skilled surgeon when wrapping electrical tape on split wires.

But the lights worked, and we punished the trains until that day in January when they went into storage.

He liked the challenge of doing this seasonal task and kept a cardboard box where he stored his cache of Christmas light bulbs. That box, now water-stained, holds up and is one of my most prized possessions. It bears his handwriting and reflects his personality.

His idea of Christmas shopping was a trip to a plain neighborhood hardware store that sold the makings of a Christmas garden or tree trimmings. He’d take me to the old Arundel Lumber Co. on York Road, where we’d ask for scraps of wood to make bridges and tunnel portals. It remains questionable if he actually bought anything, but the clerks were understanding.

He’d grow rhapsodic about the train garden his father built at 17 Poultney Street in South Baltimore. This involved a blue light bulb that created a starry winter night effect over the railroad tracks. His houses were made out of corrugated paper used to wrap General Electric light bulbs. The paper’s up-and-down ridges were painted brown and kind of resembled log cabins.

He admitted their train set was not fancy. It was made by the Bing firm in Germany and was not one of the fancy models he’d seen at French’s Sporting Goods on West Baltimore Street. The clerks there were kind enough to distribute free Lionel train catalogs. And what did it cost to dream?

I deduced he made his way to French’s on his way to greeting his own father, a grandfather who died before I was born, when he stepped off the Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railroad on a commute.

My father would lapse into a reverential tone about the arrival of the President Washington, a named steam passenger locomotive, when it slipped into Camden Station on the B&O. Over his college Christmas holiday, he worked as extra help on the platform loading and unloading express box shipments. He’d spin a humorous note about a time a gift crate of Florida grapefruit smashed open while leaving the train.

On Sunday evening, when he finished writing his Monday article, we’d drop off his copy at Western Union downtown and then watch the amazing run of real trains at Penn Station. Our viewing platform was on Falls Road under the North Avenue Bridge abutments. Or we’d drop by Lloyd’s Hobby Shop on Charles Street for the fantastic automated toy train window display of the exotic German Marklin variety.

He was far better with plywood and nails than electrical tape. He built the tables for my first train back in the President Harry Truman era. Like his box where I keep the loose Christmas lights, these train tables are not the kind of thing you can toss out without discarding a lifetime of Christmas memories. And how else would I run my trains?

Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jacques.kelly@baltsun.com and 410-332-6570.