If you want something fairly durable and easy to work on, try to find one of the older Athearn F7s with the metal truck sideframes (60’s production). Aside from headlight lenses and horns, there aren’t any details to break off, and if by some chance the shell gets damaged, there are a million out there to replace it.
I’d recommend any of the following.
-Athearn “Blue Box” locomotives. As had been mentioned "F"s are the sturdiest. Even the ones that are more modern styled with handrails have metal handrails that don’t break the way modern production examples with plastic handrails will.
-Standard Bachman F units. These are another basic loco that will run well, you can probably find them for around $40-50 at Trainworld or somesuch.
-Model POwer F units. These are affordable and run well.
-Model power also makes a tiny little switcher that runs well and quite smoothly and is only$20 bucks but might not be able to pull more than 6 cars or so.
As for a drop to the floor or Koolaid, I’m not sure there is any model train that can be relied to stand up to that kind of treatment but the ones above at least have a better chance of surviving with cosmetic damage only and possibly still running.
Good Luck!
Probably will need to teach them what a bottom switch is? LOL…
Good Luck! [:D]
Frank
Just an idea, get a cheap Bachmann set with a few cars and track, dont worry about them damaging details, use it as an educational tool to show them to be more gentle, I had a Bachmann set when I was a kid, oh and I’m on the Spectrum, never was purposely destructive but I had a tendency to disassemble things to see how they worked.
So get a set with hood unit let the handrails get broken show the kids how to glue them back, it’ll do more good than them thinking trains are industructible.
Good luck on your search and hopefully one of the kids will get into the hobby someday!
I think bachmann F units are a good choice for motive power. Not to many details to break off.
With kids i would do some type of under the bed layout since its less likely a loco on the floor will be dropped.
You could pick up some trainset quality rolling stock at a train show or ebay and upgrade the couplers to knuckle (either with Kadee talgo adapters or replacing the talgos with body mounts).