My grandparents are Minnesota snowbirds who head down to Arizona every winter, staying just outside of Phoenix.  Every year my parents and I would visit them, and one of my best and clearest memories of those trips was seeing the trains.  A model railroading club rented out a small storefront a few blocks away and they had rooms full of model railroads.  Their brand achievement, a huge HO scale layout, filled a space the size of a high school classroom.  The toy trains thundered over trestles, up mountains, through cities and around switching yards.  Tiny people went to work, bought gas and washed their cars.  Model planes flew overhead and the lakes and rivers sparkled and shone.  The old men running the trains were happy to show me around and soon I was hooked.  That winter I went back home and started building my own model railroad.

Toy train setups run the gamut, from a simple oval of track around the kitchen table or a Christmas tree to grandiose, room filling endeavors.  The most common scale of toy trains is HO, sort of the middleweight scale with N scale trains being smaller and O scale trains being larger.  Most first timers buy HO scale train sets, since HO equipment is the cheapest and most plentiful.  It’s also a good size to work with, allowing model railroaders to get a good amount of track into a reasonable sized space but without making everything so small it’s difficult to work with.

If you want to set up a semi-permanent toy train setup, it’s a good idea to start with a 4′x8′ piece of plywood, either on the floor or elevated on a tabletop, to give yourself a base on which to mount everything else.  Then, before laying any track, plan out where you want your train tracks to go and what landscaping needs to be done.  With wire mesh and paper mache you can make all sorts of mountains, hills and valleys.  When people get serious about toy trains they often model their toy railroads after real railroads, replicating actual cities and landscapes.  To enjoy toy trains you don’t need to get too fussy, some people take great enjoyment in setting up the tracks and moving engines and cars about the tracks.  Toy trains offer a connection to the past and a way to recreate some wonderful aspects of the outside world in moving miniature.