Trains are Toys
[Introduction][This Means Something][Top Shelf][Main Street][Tin Towne][Highway.61][Monument Valley]
When I was a kid, I had an o-scale figure-8 train set on a piece of press-board that lived under my bed. I remember staging train robberies with plastic cowboys and Indians and building canyons out of wooden blocks. I also regularly pushed my school safety scissors to create a shower of sparks until the engine derailed. In the summer of 2002, I pulled that Louis Marx train out of the attic.
My idea was to run it across the wall of bookshelves in my den first and then expand the line all the way around the room. The engine still ran and the floodlight car still lit. But transformer had erratic output. About this time, Toys Trains and Collectibles moved to their new location just down the street from our church (they have since moved again). They usually had 40-watt transformers in stock for reasonable prices. So it looked like I might be in business.
Of course they also introduced me to the 4-wheel Marx tin trains. Cool! The tin approximations suit my fancy much more than the high-dollar scale models. After all, trains are toys.