Instead of the standard gift exchange at Christmastime this year we’re considering one gift for the family. Brad is the right age for the once in a life-time train set and the rest of us has good memories of other train sets of Christmases before.
Years ago, Elv’s mother picked up a train set and oddments pertaining thereto at a garage sale. She was surprised with Elv’s delight. He says, “She had no idea that I, at 17 years old, would set it up in the living room on the hardwood floor of the farmhouse where we lived.” It’s the loss we regret the most from our house fire three months after we married.
This morning I’ve been looking online at train sets. I soon realized that I needed a 101 course on scale and gauge. And how ever am I to know if a steel gauge on road bed means that the track is metal and will stay together without after market soldering?! And what serious train enthusiast wants a Harry Potter train set! The passenger train sets are boring. And do I want that new and popular scale Z? I doubt it. Can you imagine the guys’ big logger hands handling the tiny pieces without flying apart themselves? What we really would enjoy is going to cost just as much as all our gift buying combined ever did! How about a G scale train…the cars are close to 7 inches high. They call it a garden scale train. I can just see a rail set up in the flower gardens with the little train choo-chooing in and out among the dahlias, marigolds, and shrubbery, can’t you?
I’m in the market for somone’s old castoff boxes of trains and tracks sitting back there under the eaves in the attic. The tracks have to be metal and the we prefer that the train is industrial with an engine or two, coal cars, log cars, box cars, and a veritable caboose. And of course, it should be powered by electricity.