TrainDad

Toy trains, while still very much enjoyed, are no longer enough.

The munchin must have a model rail­road. A real one, with snow (appar­ently model rail­roads with­out snow aren’t real). He’s will­ing to be very, very patient for it (“this will take us years to make”) but he’s locked on and I don’t think any­thing is going to break that lock. A few days ago he met us at break­fast with the announce­ment that he had started pray­ing that God would let him have a big HO scale Norfolk-Southern diesel engine. At least God has all the details he needs to place the order.

I remem­ber my teenage trial-entry into the world of model rail­road­ing, and I remem­ber one thing in par­tic­u­lar: pric­ing for the whole indus­try is based on the bank accounts of old retired men with large pen­sions. It’s a crazy-expensive hobby, par­tic­u­larly for a 5-year-old, and not one I really have any desire to pour money into right now.

But know­ing how per­sis­tent this kid is, I’m plot­ting strategy.

I’ve got challenges:

1. I’m broke.
2. I have no spare time.
3. Our house has no extra room.

But I’ve also got a few things on my side.

1. Munchkin is patient. Unlike most 5-year-olds. It’s okay if it takes us a year or two to get started!
2. Munchkin is eas­ily sat­is­fied. An oval on a piece of wood will do, at first, land­scap­ing not manda­tory. No brass engines required.
3. I’m pretty clever at things like this.

Since I have some time to work with, I have the lux­ury of being able to watch clear­ance sales at the dis­count web sites and local stores. And I just found this: a $15 engine!

I’ll keep you updated.

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!