My mom was big into these things in the 90s, specifically the Charles Dickens village series. We had hundreds of buildings, I'm not joking. My dad built a custom table setup out of cut up 4x8 plywood, we had at least 4 tables that I can remember all shaped to fit our large living room perimeter. The tables were shaped and curved to fit all the buildings and railroad, and my mom used these 2" thick piece of foam that were cut and shaped as a base for all of the buildings and train, that was then topped with some kind of fabric "snow." Then she placed all the trees, pathways, stone walls and gates, etc. into the foam bases and then placed all the houses.
My mom stopped doing it in the mid 2000s, idk why but maybe she just lost interest, and now all of those Christmas village buildings and everything is in like 10 storage boxes in her attic. I actually thought about selling them all a few years ago for her but they're not worth all that much outside of a few specific ones.
God I wish I had pictures of it, maybe I do somewhere but this was the 90s and there weren't cell phone cameras or anything.
