Reply to What you wish you'd known about train sets and train tables

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Reply to "What you wish you'd known about train sets and train tables"

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[quote=Anonymous]I (and lots of other family members) bought Thomas train wooden track stuff for my DD who was my first child.  I am really glad that we decided to stick with the one brand so everything matches, and that I was able to get the entire extended family on board with this.  It was good quality stuff... only one piece has broken after many years of play.  I can't say for sure that the Thomas brand is still that high quality, though, as this was back before they changed styles, and it seems everything always goes downhill anyway.  It seemed like it cost a FORTUNE at the time, but looking back, it has been SO worth it.  It has been played with off & on for years, both by the DD it was originally purchased for, and by younger siblings.  I fully intend to keep all of it and I know the grandkids will love it too when that time comes.

As far as advice, I recommend putting most of your investment into different track pieces, rather than different trains to put on the track.  At least in my family, most of the play involved setting up complex layouts, rather than actually running the trains.  A typical Saturday morning play session might go like this:  spend half an hour setting up a track layout, spend 5 minutes running the trains around to see how many different ways they can get from point A to point B, spend another half an hour tweaking the design while occasionally running a train to test the track, move on to something else once the track is "perfect".  Related to this, the really short pieces, about 1-3" long get used a lot to fill in holes when you are trying to make pieces connect.  Buy lots of those.  Also, I am really glad we never bought a train table. My children's track layouts often took up much more floor space than even the biggest table I've ever seen, so a table would either have limited their creativity or not been used most of the time.  Plus, all the pieces we have fit nicely into one small u-haul moving box, and the table would have been a bit more difficult to store when not in use.  Having things spread out on the floor also made it easier for several family members to play all at once, where a train table would either have been small enough it would get crowded fast, or big enough that it was hard to reach the middle.[/quote]

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