My brother Dennis sent me this link to a video of the doggonest miniature train setup you've ever seen:
in Germany, covering nearly half an acre, at a cost of 8 million Euros (paid for by charging admission).
My friend Mark Cappel remarked when I sent him this link:
"Have you ever had a train set? It's a maintenance nightmare. Any humidity at all and the tracks corrode and the trains halt or run erratically, which would be hell with the 46-ft train. They must have a humidity controlled room and a trapeze device for flying people in to clean the tracks."
But for most of us kids, the train set never got to the point where it was able to become a maintenance nightmare: It was everything you could do to get the engine to run completely around the track; the set never had enough power; you were always adding track in an attempt to make an actually interesting layout -but the more track you laid, the harder it was for the electrical system to drive the engine, and the slower everything went. My most common memory is of stationing a younger brother at the far end of the track to nudge the engine around the far corner when it stalled, as it did every time.
A few hours of that and we'd had enough for a few weeks. A few hours every month, over the course of a couple of years, then it sat in the basement for a couple of decades - until my mom threw the whole thing out one year -- to the shock and dismay of me and my five brothers. "But you haven't used it in years. In fact, none of you have been down into the basement since you moved away!" "Yeah, but you should have *told* us you were getting rid of it!" [Wives of same brothers, sub-voce to my Mother: "Thank you for throwing it out! He would just have stored it in *our* basement for the next twenty years!"]
Mac McCarthy
Editorial Director
