In 1952 alone, Lionel Corp. had produced 622,209 toy train engines and 2,460,764 miniature cars, which, as historian Ron Hollander noted, eclipsed “the nation’s railroads, which then had a mere 43,000 locomotives and 1.8 million cars in service.”

Joshua Lionel Cowen began making “electrical novelties” at 24 Murray St., near City Hall, as the Lionel Manufacturing Co. Business was slow. He invented a battery-powered electric fan: “It was the most beautiful thing you ever saw. It ran like a dream and it had only one thing wrong with it. You could stand a foot away from the thing and not feel any breeze.” But he felt sure of finding another use for the little motor he had designed for the fan.

While walking on Cortlandt Street near his office, he paused before Robert Ingersoll’s toy store. The window display verged on the dull: cast-iron fire engines, wind-up boats, elephants on wheels, and a tin locomotive, all sitting lifeless. Cowen thought an electric toy in constant motion might draw a crowd. He looked at the locomotive again, remembered his fan motor, and shortly returned with the first Lionel train. Ingersoll was sold.

The Electric Express was an open wooden box with Cowen’s fan motor, attached to the car’s bottom, geared to its flanged wheels. It ran on track made of metal strips set in wooden ties. Dry cell batteries wired to the track transmitted electricity to and from the motor. Cowen recalled, “Well, sir, the next day (Ingersoll) was back for another. The first customer who saw it bought the advertisement instead of the goods.” Other stores ordered them. Cowen had found his niche.

In 1902, he produced his first trolley car, sold as a set with 30 feet of steel track for $7. This was not a toy just any child could afford: a worker’s weekly wages then averaged $9.42. A year later, he produced his first locomotive, gondola car, and operating accessory: a derrick with a crank-operated hook to pick up freight loads and swing them into the gondola. In 1906, he eliminated the clumsy batteries with a transformer that reduced house current to a level suitable for toy trains. His catalog now listed steam and electric locomotives and passenger and freight cars, brightly painted and lettered.

Cowen promoted his trains as educational because he knew parents needed to rationalize their purchase: “Knowledge of electricity is valuable, not only as a profession, but as an education…” Lionel came to dominate its market with ever more realistic toy locomotives, complete with bells and whistles, sold though lavishly illustrated color catalogs. By the late 1930s, his model of New York Central’s Hudson steam locomotive showed that Cowen could also create elegant scale miniatures that started, stopped, slowed, and accelerated in response to push-button remote controls. When toy production resumed after World War II, Cowen’s marketing struck a perfect chord between nostalgia and progress, and orders poured in.

Lionel’s showroom on East 26th Street held an enormous layout with signals flashing, drawbridges rising, tiny men pushing tiny milk cans from white refrigerator cars, and cattle herding themselves into stock cars. Cowen, who had handed over Lionel’s presidency to his son, Lawrence, loved to spend hours among the crowds, providing expert advice to customers. Hollander recounts how Lawrence, who lived at 2 Sutton Place, was awakened by his doorbell at 6 a.m. one Christmas Day. He found two small neighbors in pajamas, who asked, “Can you fix our trains?” Apparently, their parents were asleep. Lawrence, in bathrobe and slippers, followed them up to their apartment. Lionel’s president soon had the trains running. Then he wished the boys a Merry Christmas and padded back to bed.

Such good times rarely last. From 1953, Lionel’s best year, to 1959, sales dropped by more than half. Hollander blames television (families preferred watching “I Love Lucy” to running trains) and aging (older boys were more interested in Elvis, girls, and cars). Cowen’s salesmanship had fit the nation’s mood for eight years. Then, suddenly, it didn’t.

In 1959, Cowen sold his company. Lionel nonetheless survived, today making toy trains far more sophisticated than anything Cowen ever imagined. When Joshua Lionel Cowen died in 1965, the New York Times wrote that he had made Lionel trains “the third wing of Christmas, along with the evergreen tree and Santa Claus.” And in 1999, an A &E special on the 20th century’s top 10 toys ranked Lionel fourth, surpassed only by yoyos, crayons, and Barbie.