Track for my daughter

[fjacky]

Hello All,

My 2 year old daughter just loves her plastic train set. It's just a cheapo set.

My plans now are to build her a real train set. I want to put a shelf at the top of her bedroom wall and have the train go around in circles around her whole room and possibly go through the wall into my future child's room and come back around. I am BRAND new to this and was wondering if HO scale would be best? The rooms are only 10 x 10 or so.

Any thoughts?

 

[TrainNut]

You know I was going to do this to but at that age, my son really loved pushing the trains around the track more than anything else and I realized that it would not be very interactive up on the wall next to the ceiling. So instead, we just used our big Christmas train, put down a simple TEMPORARY oval of track on the floor and let him go to it. He loved it. Now he is four and his favorite thing is still pushing the trains around the track instead of operating them electrically.

 

[MasonJar]

Simply for the visibility from the floor, you may want to have something bigger than HO - the LGB has some fanciful stuff (no rivet counters allowed... ), and can be taken down and played with as well.

Welcome to The Gauge!

Andrew

 

[sumpter250]

I don't often "give advice" where it comes to someone else's children, but....I think that a very young child should have a hands on toy to play with. A train set, running around on a shelf, out of reach, will simply become part of the room decor, and interest in it will disappear quickly. A hands on toy will develop imagination, and hand-eye coordination, and may even become an interest that will last, and a hobby that can be shared. I keep thinking back to the case of the child who receives many toys, and at the end of the day, is found playing with the largest box that the toys came in.
Pete

 

[Jim Krause]

I'll go along with Sumpter 250's philosophy. Too much to soon can confuse little ones. It's a temptation that all of us parents have. I remember letting my son and a friend use the dinghy off of my sailboat one day to mess around. They promptly rowed to shore, pulled the dinghy up on the beach and proceeded to build a raft out of logs.

 

[LoudMusic]

I don't have children of my own but I have to agree with sumpter250 on his / her above post.

However! This is a great project for the parents and gives THEM something to do while the kid is crashing toys together on the floor, so I'm all for it

I would not use HO scale. In a 10 x 10 room you'll be looking mostly at the bottom of shelves. LGB (mentioned above) have larger scale (more than twice the size of HO) some of which can still handle tight turns in the corners, which is good for ceiling trackage.

Also, the type of shelving is important. If you use a wood shelf you can make it relatively deep giving you something worth having even when the trains go away (put books, pictures, fake plants, stuffed animals, etc, on it) but it obstructs the view of the train. If you were to use a wire rack shelf or even something clear like plexiglass you would have a much more visible train, though I wouldn't want that for much else (maybe stuffed animals).

I'm in the process of figuring out how I want to display a Lego train in my 10 x 12 study. My most recent thought is to use ... Lego shelving! I have plenty of extra pieces and I think I've figured out a way to screw them to the wall without damaging the toy.