As you may recall from last Saturday’s post Trainboy brought his new train engine with him when he visited cousins. The coupler was broken when he played with it there. I’d glued it and thought it worked. The glue did not hold. I have many glues, none of them worked. They apparently make the couplers out of super-anti-adhesive plastic. Crap.

After Supernurse went to work we headed for the hobby shop. Maybe they would have a replacement coupler. The lady who runs the shop was busy helping a customer so we wandered around for a while. We looked at the train layout they’re building. It has a bridge- he likes bridges. It has a tunnel and he likes tunnels too. He thought it was a fine thing.

The train I had bought Trainboy for his birthday was a Bachman with EZ-lock tracks. From the look of it the track would just snap together. From the look of it. The reality of it was that it still used connectors on each rail for the electrical contact. Trainboy prides himself on being able to do things for himself, but the track was too difficult for him. It was sometimes aggravating for me, requiring pliers to straighten a bent connector.

So I figured there’s got to be a better way. It does no good for Trainboy to have a train he can’t play with when he wants. So we looked at the train sets too. Life- Like sets use a system they call Power Lock. The tracks snap together side-ways and don’t use rail connectors. Hmm…

The set he already has is a fairly small oval. It seemed reasonable that if he liked it we’d just expand it. Buying a new system would mean the first one is either junk, or rarely used. There is such a thing as cutting your losses though and this seemed like such a time.

I picked out a set that’s much larger than his original one. It’s a double oval almost six foot long and about four feet wide. The ovals overlap, meaning it has a bridge- a good thing. It also comes with a mountain so it has a tunnel, the other good thing. There are also loaders and unloaders for coal and rocks, moving gateways, boxcars, gondolas and the always-important caboose. Guys like toys.

He liked it, no doubt about it. Trainboy looked at me and with a very concerned voice asked, “Is it expensive?” He didn’t want to get his hopes up and then see it go back up on the shelf. “Kinda, but we can buy it if you think you would like it.” “Okay.” He was pleased, me too. In the back of my head was a little voice threatening, “How are you going to explain this?” I didn’t care… much.


When we got to the register I asked the lady who owns the store if she had a coupler for a HO scale Bachman. She told me Bachman only came in G and O scale. There were other customers waiting so I wasn’t going to disagree with her in front of them. Call me a weenie but that’s just the way I am. She told me to check the train for it’s make and get back to her to order one. Okay.

We left the store with one large train set and one happy Trainboy. We put it in the trunk and headed out of town to get Ms. Pikachu. She was not there. They’d gone to the zoo. This made me feel even better about the train purchase. After Ms. Pikachu had gotten to go to Adventureland, the zoo, and stayed over at a cousins it seemed fair that he got a train.

We went to older brother, Herr Ronald’s, and Trainboy played with his cousins. Eventually we got the call that Ms. Pikachu was back and away we went. She was happy. Trainboy was happy. They slept soundly on the way home.

-lifelike trains

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