Note: This page was begun as part of a buyer's guide listing ideas and products to help make your family's holiday celebrations more fun. Many of the products we featured were collections from Hawthorne village, which often brought up questions about why you couldn't get the whole train or town at once. The good news is that sometimes you can, but mostly the collections follow the process described on this page.
A subscription train (or village) is not a single purchase, but a standing order to purchase each piece in the series as it becomes available. (The price posted on the Hawthorne Village order pages is the price of each issue.)
When you order a subscription train, you are billed for the first installment, and it is shipped right away, if it's been manufactured already. For the Hawthorne Village steam engine sets, such as the Thomas Kinkade Christmas set, the first issue includes the locomotive and tender (coal car). This is an exceptional value, and a bit of a gamble on the part of Hawthorne Village, because the value of the locomotive is substantially more than what you pay for the first installment. But it's not that much of a gamble really, because Hawthorne Village knows that once collectors see the quality of the first installment, they'll want the hand-painted cars that go with it (and virtually everyone does.) About a month later you will be billed for the following installment, a car and some track. The following month, you will usually receive additional track and the power supply. At that point you have enough of the train to run. If any figures come with the set, they usually come with the fourth installments. At that point, you have, not only a whole "train set," but also a limited edition collectors' item.
The installments usually come every 3 or 4 weeks, unless you happen to subscribe while the series is still being manufactured, in which case the wait for the later installments may be longer.
Some sets are so popular that the Hawthorne Village people keep making cars as long as demand stays high. Usually every car comes with additional track, and some come with additional figures or other accessories, so you are still getting good value as long as you subscribe. Occasionally you'll receive track plan information to give you ideas for using all the track you've accumulated.
As examples of high demand trains, at last count, the Winnie the Pooh train had eight cars, and the original Thomas Kinkade Christmas train had 12. But you can stop your subscription at any time, so if you think four cars is enough, just call the 1-800 number on the packaging and tell them so. combine_power_supply_small.jpg
This means that if you want to get a train to run at a particular holiday, you should try to subscribe at least three months before that holiday (four is better) to make certain you have enough of the train to run. Of course you can also order a Bachmann On30 set to let the kids run while you're waiting for the rest of the subscription train to arrive--they run on the same track, so you could run your locomotive as soon as it gets to you.
Why to Order Early
In short:
- The trains come in installments, and you probably want to have as much train as possible for the holidays or any other special occasions, such as birthdays or holidays.
- The trains are not available indefinitely.
Every October I start hearing from frantic people wanting to get a whole subscription train right now or asking for help tracking down trains they had put off ordering until the series was closed. Though I've tried hard to help everyone who has 
contacted me with "special circumstances," the truth is, I can't get these trains shipped from the manufacturer any faster than you can, and only a tiny percentage of these trains ever become available on the resale market at less than "scalping" prices.
In other words, if you're pretty sure you'd like one of these, you should order now to avoid disappointment. (All trains come with a return privileges and a warranty.) Though I frequently hear from people who are disappointed that they missed out on a set they waited too long to order, I haven't heard from one person who was disappointed with his or her train. On the contrary, I've heard from many people who were delighted with them.
Please contact me if you have any questions that aren't answered on these pages.
