TrainDad

Most of you know I’m a big Geo­T­rax fan. It’s the best rail­road toy on the block for any age (just ask the many par­ents who play with them). I’ve had a few bones to pick over the design (cou­plers, any­one?) but, for the most part, Geo­T­rax is the best engi­neered train prod­uct on the mar­ket. It blows the socks off any Thomas sys­tem, not that Thomas wears socks, but that’s off the point.

One of the best ele­ments of the Geo­T­rax sys­tem has always been their track. It is aston­ish­ingly easy to hook together, holds tightly when it should (ever stepped on it?), and is easy to pull apart when you want it to. This is due, in part, to a clever spring-loaded latch design. Look care­fully at the end of a piece of track, and you’ll see it. There’s a tongue stick­ing out, and … oh, I was try­ing to avoid the engineer’s “male” and “female” terms here because this is, after all, a fam­ily blog! On either side of the female con­nec­tion you’ll find two small plas­tic tabs stick­ing out, which catch two match­ing depres­sions on the male con­nec­tion. Push on the tabs: yep, spring loaded. At least, they should be.

In the last few months, how­ever, the Mattel/Fisher-Price bean coun­ters made what must be a mon­e­tary deci­sion that is sim­ply hor­ri­ble: they removed that spring load­ing, instead mold­ing the tabs right into the main track. They added a lit­tle cut around the tab, try­ing to give it some play, but it just doesn’t work. If you try to use this new track style — and it’s included in just about all the new prod­ucts — you’ll find that it’s very dif­fi­cult to con­nect together.

If you’re not sure what I’m talk­ing about, there’s another way to see it: turn the track over. The old-style track has a flat, boxy cover glued over the cou­plers on either end, encas­ing the spring mech­a­nism. The new track is a sin­gle molded piece.

Try it. See if you don’t agree that the new track is dif­fi­cult to connect.

Dif­fi­cult = BAD! My 2-year-old could con­nect the old track by him­self. Now he’s 5, and he’s asked for help sev­eral times with the new track. Dif­fi­cult = BAD!

There is recourse, how­ever. My lovely bride called Fisher-Price to com­plain that she couldn’t put the new track together, and they mailed her a rebate coupon for $15 towards the pur­chase of more Geo­T­rax. Another gift at Christ­mas had the same new track, so she made another call and received yet another coupon. We can still find the old track in some track packs, so we’ll replace it that way. More impor­tantly, we’re giv­ing Fisher-Price feed­back: fix the track!

I hope you’ll con­sider doing the same thing.

What does one write, after a hia­tus last­ing more than two years? I have no idea. So I’ll stum­ble through a few things and then fol­low up with some more per­ti­nent posts.

WHAT HAPPENED

My day job includes design­ing spe­cial exhi­bi­tions for an art museum. In Decem­ber of 2007, right after that last post, I began work on the design and sub­se­quent instal­la­tion of a new expan­sion facil­ity. It was a mas­sive job that com­pletely con­sumed my life for well over a year. The end result is an awe­some, world-class exhi­bi­tion with an edu­ca­tional wing that is espe­cially great. I’m proud of it.

WHY I’M BACK

Well, it’s like this. This whole time I’ve been lurk­ing on the Yahoo Geo­T­rax group, and over the last week or so the dis­cus­sion has turned to mak­ing cou­plers for Geo­T­rax. If you’ve read my past posts you know that’s a sub­ject dear to my heart, and it finally gave me the gen­tly nudge to get mov­ing again.

ABOUT THAT TRIP

Holy cow, that camp­ing trip was amaz­ing. I had never camped on the beach before, and the expe­ri­ence was fan­tas­tic. I’ll give an off-topic post with more details.

ABOUT THOSE COUPLERS

I cast plas­tic cou­plers that work iden­ti­cally to the stan­dard Geo­T­rax cou­plers. They were bril­liant, but had one sig­nif­i­cant issue … I couldn’t fig­ure out a good way to attach them to the ridicu­lously wide range of Geo­T­rax engine and car designs. That had me stymied for a long time, but about a month ago I acci­den­tally ran into the per­fect solu­tion: epoxy putty. So I’m back on track. I’ll get a post up with the details and some pic­tures, and I’ll get them up for sale as soon as possible.

ONE MORE THING

Before I get into all those, I’m going to post on what I see as the worst thing that’s hap­pened to Geo­T­rax since they stopped mak­ing Geo: the intro­duc­tion of track that doesn’t have spring-loaded cou­plers. It’s my lat­est soap­box and I want to beg you for help to get it fixed.

Thanks for the sup­port. See you again soon!