The Dixie Toy Train Club put on a little 3 rail show in my town today. They set up a little 2 track module and had some Williams locos running on it. (lots of smoke!) They had a card table set up with an O scale Thomas running on it. You should have seen the kids freaking out over it. Kids were throwing tantrums left and right when it was time to leave. Crying! Screaming! Rolling on the ground! “I WANT THOMAS!!! WAAA!!!” I had to wait 10 minutes to get through the door while some grandpa tried to pry his grandsons fingers off the door jam! These kids just didn’t want to leave! I wish I had thought to take a video of it. It was hysterical!
Hopefully some of that energy will carry over into model railroading when they grow up.
PS-Club guys didn’t have anything good to say about MTH or their DSC.[(-D]
I was the same way when I was a kid. If we went to someplace that there was a model train layout, I was glued to it. My parents would have to break out the crowbar to get me away from it.
When I was yunger than I is now (like when I was yunger than 8) when we went down to joplin (you guys proly don’t know were or what joplin is) there is a toys r us and I would always beg to go there and look and or buy wodden tomas stuff.
When I younger than 8 there wasn’t any any Thomas. My first two electric trains were made by Marklin and Lionel, in that order. I didn’t know HO existed until 1966.
hehehehe we have that all the time at the rail museum (we have a model railroad club that operates at the museum cause they we kicked out of their old place)
Reminds me of the last train show I went too. I was running my big boy on the club layout… There was this 6 or 7 year old kid watching it. He watched it for at least an hour, then his dad said it was time to leave. Just about the same thing happened, except over a big boy and not thomas…
I remember back in the days when department stores would have their huge Lionel, AF and Marx displays for the Christmas season, my older cousin would always bring me down from Nevada City to Sacramento so that we could spend the day in Weinstocks, Hales, Montgomery Ward, Sears, Western Auto, Penney’s and Woolworths (does anyone remember some of these stores?) and spend the day staring at the intricate layouts that had been constructed so that Dads could spend some of their very hard-earned money on their sons (and themselves) to make those HUGE dreams come true. We’d always leave with Dick telling me “You really should tell your dad to invest in Lionel,” and I was thinking, “I’d really like to have Dad invest in American Flyer,” and my eyes would be starry for WEEKS.
A kid hanging onto a door kicking and screaming because he was being dragged away from Thomas?
I remember staring longingly at the AHM locomotives and cars at Woolworths. Had my eye on an MILW E8. Never got it, but sure loved looking at it and dreaming.
My oldest kid got his middle name from an ancestor of my wife, who enlisted with the union 3rd Missouri Volunteer Infantry Regiment in St. Louis and then was sent down to the SW corner of Missouri/NW corner of Arkansas to take part in the Battle of Pea Ridge (aka Elkhorn Tavern), near what is now the Wal-Mart HQ town of Bentonville, AR, about 30-40 miles south of Joplin, Missouri.
And yes - my kid was a Thomas the Tank Engine nut at age three, too - we still have a huge collection of wooden tracks, engines and cars.
