TrainDad

Geo­T­rax Add-on Couplers

It took for­ever, but here they are. The qual­ity of the first cast­ing was lousy, but they are up to snuff now and we’re run­ning them non­stop on sev­eral trains! Now if I can just fig­ure out this e-commerce thing, I’ll send you some.

Trevor can pull a train at last!

It took for­ever, but man it’s incred­i­ble! We’ve got hooks on the back of trains that were miss­ing them, and loops on the front of oth­ers. We’ve got Trevor pulling cars like he should have done in the first place, and we’ve got the coolest double-headers: never before pos­si­ble! If you can’t tell, this rail­road house­hold is excited. My lit­tle guy had decided that Trevor must be a “rail­car” that car­ried pas­sen­gers in the back, since he didn’t have a coupler.

A real Geo­T­rax double-header.

And that red engine in the pic­ture up there is the one that started this whole thing: for some rea­son, he’s wanted that engine to be the sec­ond in a double-header for a long, long time. And more: cou­plers on trucks, cou­plers on trol­leys. He’s in cou­pler heaven.

The cou­plers are extremely easy to install. I’ve got com­plete instruc­tions, with pic­tures, ready to post. Stay tuned.

It has been a long road, but I’ve finally got it worked out. Here’s how it works:

1. There are two styles of cou­pler: I’m call­ing them hooks and loops. You know what I’m talk­ing about: front cou­plers that are a loop of plas­tic, and back cou­plers that a hook stick­ing up.
2. Each of those cou­plers has a ver­ti­cal flat sur­face which attach to the Geo­T­rax vehi­cle. I orig­i­nally tried to make cou­plers fit to a spe­cific model of vehi­cle, but the num­ber of designs was over­whelm­ingly com­plex; I needed a sim­pler way. I ended up find­ing that one basic design worked best, but I needed a way to attach them to a wide vari­ety of bodies.
3. The break­through came when I dis­cov­ered epoxy putty. This stuff squishes to the shape of the vehi­cle and makes a generic cou­pler fit any vehicle.

In real­ity, this tech­nique works for about three-fourths of the vehi­cles we’ve tried it on. I’ll deal with that prob­lem next.

I’m installing the e-commerce plu­gin now, and will open it up as soon as I can. At this point, my plan is to offer:

1. A basic kit. It will have an assort­ment of hooks and loops, as well as enough epoxy putty to attach them.
2. Indi­vid­ual cou­plers. They come in sev­eral col­ors: white, black, brown, yel­low, pur­ple, green, orange, red, peach, and blue.

I hope to add a mod­i­fied cou­pler set that will work for those odd vehi­cles that don’t like this design. Some day, I might also add a mount­ing guide; it’s impor­tant to get the cou­plers mounted at the right height and angle, and that would be much eas­ier if there were a tool to help.

Stay tuned. I’ll open the “store” as soon as pos­si­ble, hope­fully tomor­row (the links are active in the right menu, but you can’t see any­thing yet). I’ll have pic­tures and a com­plete instruc­tion set online too. Thanks for your patience!

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!

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been locked deep in the Top Secret Under­ground Lab­o­ra­tory, wear­ing my big gog­gles while stir­ring large vats of bub­bling green goo. I’ve finally emerged, and beyond the crazed look in my eyes you might notice a bit of a sparkle, because I’ve got some­thing good for you Geo­t­rax fans.

Yup, easy add-on cou­plers. Has any­one else noticed that fewer and fewer Geo­t­rax vehi­cles can be hooked together? What really got me going was the Friend­liest Team–twin trol­leys, Chatty and Chirpy, that are so friendly they can’t cou­ple to each other or any­one else. No hooks, no loops, noth­ing. What does that mean to my 3-year-old? The trol­leys sit off to the side, because play­ing with them means it’s hard to play with any­thing else. No trains, no long lines of every-car-we-own con­sists. For a kid who loves trains, that’s what it’s all about. So I decided to do some­thing about it.

What I’ve ended up with are molded plas­tic cou­plers that can be attached to any Geo­t­rax vehi­cle. (Or any­thing else in the world, for that mat­ter, though I’m not sure why you would, but hey–you buy, I’ll sell, whether you stick them on your Geo­t­rax or on your pink plas­tic flamingo. No dif­fer­ence to me.) Since the Geo­t­rax line has a wide vari­ety of “bumpers” where there should be cou­plers, I’ve made them with a mount­ing sur­face that fits as many as pos­si­ble. Over time, I might make a few dif­fer­ent vari­eties to fit a few spe­cific vehi­cles that are prob­lem­atic, but don’t hold your breath… this generic ver­sion fits almost everything.

I should have pic­tures and more detailed infor­ma­tion up by tomor­row, along with pric­ing and order­ing info. My goal is not to get rich off of these; they won’t be out­ra­geous. Stay tuned!

Today our lit­tle guy, Jonathan, turned three years old. The biggest adven­ture cen­tered around “Day Out With Thomas” at the North Car­olina Trans­porta­tion Museum. This event hosted the “real” Thomas — the live steam Porter-conversion brought in from the Strass­burg (In case you don’t know, the major­ity of these events use non-powered ver­sions that rely on local power). I’ve not planned on par­tic­i­pat­ing in one of these events, because the price is crazy for some­thing that you don’t even really get to expe­ri­ence. I mean, if you could actu­ally ride on Thomas him­self, that would be some­thing spe­cial; but rid­ing in a pas­sen­ger car behind Thomas is no dif­fer­ent than rid­ing in the same car behind any other loco­mo­tive. And doing it with 400 other scream­ing tod­dlers isn’t exactly my idea of a “day out” — a day out of my mind, more like it. In any case, a lov­ing uncle bought tick­ets, so there we were.

The ride was about what I expected; Jonathan enjoyed it, though, and I’m glad we had the oppor­tu­nity. We got much more excite­ment out of watch­ing Thomas drive. If you go to one of these events, I rec­om­mend ask­ing right up front where the best view­ing loca­tion is to see Thomas start up. That’s the excit­ing moment, as he belches smoke and steam and the dri­ving wheels slip. We also watched him from above, stand­ing on a bridge. He tooted his tinny Eng­lish whis­tle once as he went under, his engi­neer lean­ing out the win­dow and waving.

One of the things Jonathan enjoyed most was the Norfolk-Southern engine on a side track. They allowed vis­i­tors into the cab, let them sit in the driver’s seat and han­dle the con­trols. With the engine run­ning, it was a great expe­ri­ence to push the throt­tle and hear the diesel roar. And it’s always a delight to blow the horn!

Other high­lights included rides on a “caboose train” and a large HO-scale model rail­road set up by a local club.

Finally, Jonathan received a Geo­T­rax Grand Cen­tral Sta­tion set as a birth­day gift. This is the “expanded set” with extra cars and a DVD. JB was so excited he just didn’t know how to express it. Aero is his new favorite — he asked if he could sleep with Aero tonight.

Lots to talk about over the next few days… notes on Thomas and Geo­t­rax and Track­Mas­ter and more. Stay tuned!