re: Model trains and sets

I want to get into because my son (9yo) loves trains (mostly juvenile Thomas though) and I'd love to get him into something that focuses his attention and is more age appropriate. I had a train set when I was young and enjoyed.

Recently found out there was The Electric Train Depot place in Ponchatoula.

Anybody ever visit the Museum of Science and Industry Museum in Chicago and see their model train display? I could watch it for hours.

Science & Industry Trains

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You can say this about damn near any hobby.

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True. You can buy a bicycle for $100, but a hardcore cyclist spends more than that on each of shoes, helmet, pedals, even shorts. The bike is several grand.

A shotgun can be had for a few hundred, but a passionate sporting clays or trap shooter might drop $10,000 or more for an over-under shotgun.

I love the story a guy told about his shotgun. He told his wife he paid $10K for it, but he told his friend that if he dropped dead to not to let her sell that gun for a measly $10K.

My dad spent tens if not 100k of money one model trains throughout my childhood. He had numerous room filling sets.

His coup de gras was his outdoor set with about 600 feet of track around his garden. It really was very creatively done. My mom put a stop to that because of all the time and money he wasted on that. It was a very beautiful and well done, he just got too old and fat to keep it up.

My parents didn’t pay for my school (which is fine) and my dad always says my college education can be found in G scale running around the back.

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Recently found out there was The Electric Train Depot place in Ponchatoula.

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This is one of the nicer, more stocked train shops in all of the south...really! (over the years I been to probably 50 shops in 20 states...whenever I traveled I would always seek out a shop I had not been to yet).

Jeff, the owner, opened it as he couldn’t get any help, orders, or service from the two shops in Kenner (ten or so years ago). They were notoriously bad, and most people in the hobby avoided them like the plague. He was trying to build a layout for his grandson, and decided to just become a dealer himself.

Since he has done very well with his electro-plating business, he didn’t need to rely on the train shop to live on...it was more of a hobby for him...but he had people there all the time running it.

The Electric Train Depot train shop on Hwy. 51 began as one room in the front vacant warehouse on the large property, and he quickly began to add more walls and rooms to accommodate more stock and now has 5 operating layouts and every gauge (with O being the best represented)...probably 2500 sq. ft. of retail space.

I played around with trains as a 12-13 yr old. First set HO gauge, was made by Tyco. Canadian Pacific locomotive. I was woefully unhandy at building layouts and too lazy to take the time to learn. No Dad to help or motivate me. So it soon lost its luster and fell by the wayside. My favorite shop was The Hub Hobby Shop on S. Broad. Didn’t know squat about what I was doing, but I liked poking around that store to dream. When my own son was about 6, I tried again, hoping to interest him. I was still woefully unhandy at layout design or building. And he (born 1981), was not a bit interested. So it goes...

The electronic evolution of the hobby has made it exponentially more realistic than when we were kids just watching the train run around a track with no sound. Everything about it now is like you’re playing with the real thing.
Totally enjoyed setting up my first layout, laying track and track bed, assembling the buildings, the scenery and building the cars from kits. Then we moved and I had to take the thing down - an experience I won’t go thru again.

I collect (and sometimes run) pre-WWII trains. My office used to be a jewelry store, so I filled up the cabinets with trains (mostly).

The big trains are "standard" gauge - on the shelf, the trains in front of them are the typical Lionel size (O gauge) so you can see how big the standard gauge trains are. Most of the trains are 1915-1942.

I like vintage stuff from that time period, including cars.

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Craigslist guy who wanted someone to join him in stomping and kicking over his trains.

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First thing I think of too. Didn't he say something about eating imitation crab meat as an enticer?