As a kid of the 1950s, I had Lionel. The American Flyer S gauge had 2 rails and was more realistic and detailed, but only a handful of people had them. It seemed like the were the Apple computer geeks of the times. Their dads usually put them on a neat plywood layout but, it was Lionel on the floor if you wanted to have an electric train.
Did the kids with American Flyer trains grow up to be engineers (not trains) and the math teachers? What did you have and what did you grow up to be.
The reason my parents bought me an American Flyer set was because it was cheaper then Lionel. I recently bought a book on American Flyer and found that the set I had was the cheapest starter set. I thought it was the greatest. I had no concept of cheap or expensive. I just knew that I thoroughly enjoyed playing with the train. I poured over each new American Flyer and Lionel catalog. I knew I would not be getting the big engines shown in the catalogs but it didn’t matter. We had fun with what we had.
My brother and I spent countless hours racing our trains. We would place a metal object, such as a knife, across each others track to short out the opponents train. We also raced our trains while pushing a pool ball on the tracks.
In my neighborhood the AF guys were geeks, and it was just as you discribed. However, I had a used broken Lionel, and my career has been as a Manufacturing Engineer/Program Manager.
haha very true. You can’t beat mario, but sonic had its perks as well. Im too young to have a first hand account on this, but since Sega and Nintendo were brought up I figured Id chime in.
My grandpa had American Flyer as a kid. I dont know if he was a geek (don’t think he’d tell me if he was) but he did set up his trains on plywood tables like you said and he did become an electrician and later a computer technician. As for wanting Lionel… when I started collecting lionel trains he would make fun of the 3rd rail every time he came over.
Don’t upset the geeks one of them is probably your boss at work[swg]
I had none of the above born in 1961 in the UK my first trains and I still have some of them where Triang two rail.
There are two kinds of train buyers those that want toys and those that want some semblance of reality
I see some one got ragged about the third rail well I did the same thing to one of my friends because the had Hornby Dublo three rail trains that where given to him by various relatives
He did not care about the third rail and he like me had them set up on train tables made by our parents
We both had great fun with the trains so it is immaterial which ones you have but oh the wonderful memories and that’s whats important.
I think it was mainly that a kid had what the kid’s parents (aka Santa) bought him. My best freind had AF, and I had Lionel. Neither of us had asked for a certain “brand”. I don’t think cost came into the AF purchase, since his family had a cook and a groundskeeper. Joe
Had Lionel and AF; no rich daddy to buy them for me. I got them used with snow shoveling money. My mom sold them when I joined the Marines so nothing to show for it but an old beat up AF tank car
First set was actually Marx. Didn’t last a year. I was a bit too young. Next set was Lionel which I still have. I probably fit the description of a Geek as I always studied-eventually became a high school math teacher and them a University/Junior College math professor. Grade school friend had an American Flyer-he was a tad geeky. One Geek had Marx and another Marx afficianado didn’t seem to fit that description. One of my later buddies had Lionel and he was definitely not a Geek. Saw more Marx because my hometown, North Girard (now Lake City), PA was separated from Girard, PA where Louis Marx had one of his major plants by the main line of the Nickel Plate Road… The other Marx plant was in Erie, PA about 15 miles East.
I was born in the '70s so I can’t speak from personal experience. Dad was born in 1943, had Lionel, grew up to have bachelor’s degrees in physics, chemistry and biology and became a doctor (an osteopath, not an MD–which required a couple of extra years of school).
Dad was certainly aware of AF, and how it had better realism (two rails, and the scale was more consistent). But Lionel was a status symbol. His dad delivered the babies in town and his mom was the psychiatrist, so it wouldn’t do for the doctors’ (plural) son to have anything but a Lionel. They were Scottish though (read: thrifty) and that came through. They bought Lionel starter sets, then expanded them with Marx track and switches, which was cheaper.
I think the toys you play with can have an effect on what you end up doing with your life. Lionel wasn’t a daily part of my life growing up but I had a computer. I ended up working in computers.
I question the assertion that AF was more realistic. Number of rails aside, the AF rails were just as or more out of scale than Lionel’s, and the tie design and placement was every bit as toylike. Until late, AF used decidedly ugly couplers far less realistic than Lionel. AF deisels had gaps in their pilots as big or bigger than Lionel’s. Neither wad details any more accurate or in scale than the other.
AF advertising aside, both were pattently NOT scale models, although each had models close to scale in size.
I would agree that ANYONE that played with trains was a “geek” and liable to bullying by other kids whose idea of a precision instrument was the baseball bat.
The AF ties and rails were certainly way off scale (Pikemaster helped, but the tighter radius caused other problems) but AF had wider-radius track that was much closer to scale, its trucks were much closer to scale, and its trains were consistently pretty close to 1:64, including the trucks. The scale on Lionel’s stuff was generally anywhere from 1:64 to 1:55 but they put 1:48 trucks on all of it. Many of AF’s accessories were close to 1:48 though. Neither of them holds up well by modern scale standards, and I’ll certainly grant you that vintage Athearn HO had better scale detail and fidelity than AF did.
The link coupler always bothered Gilbert but it took a while to develop a knuckle coupler that wouldn’t infringe on Lionel’s patents. I’m pretty sure I read in an old CTT that the inventor of the Lionel knuckle tried to sell it to AF first in the late 1930s (before the Gilbert buyout) but AF didn’t have the money so the inventor sold it to Lionel. Makes for an interesting what-if scenario, doesn’t it? Both designs opted for reliability/ease of use over scale fidelity.
Indeed. I wish he would have lived longer so I could have learned more from him. But it probably would have been a case of "If we weren&#
Lionel was King, AF was wishbook material to me I was too young to really appreciate the differences between S, O-27 or O at the time. I discovered a complete set of Santa-Fe Warbonnets at the last Little Rock trainshow (Complete with very inflated price tag) that brought alot of memories back.
Geek? hardly. I took on the big boys and bullies (Im a shrimp) and took on trucking as soon as I understood mcjobs didnt have a future.
Growing up in the fifties, I was fortunate to have several sets of postwar Lionel, along with lots of accessories, which my Dad and I played with together. Some of my friends had AF, but the main thing that distinguished us from the rest of the neighborhood, was the fact that we kept our trains up year round. The layout wasn’t anything fancy (two sheets of plywood in the basement), but my buddies and I were never bored. During the summer we had a daily ritual; baseball all morning, come home for lunch, and then in the hot afternoons, running the trains down in the cool basement. Ah, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Breathing all that ozone and smoke pellet fumes year round, how could I not be a nerd and grow up to become a physicist? [:D]