Based on my age and going through middle school and high school in the 1980's, playing with trains was a recipe for not having friends, especially when it came to my feeble attempts at dating in high school. 
However, it is funny to me later in life how many people I went to high school with who saw my layout say how cool they thought it was. It just wasn't fashionable to say so at that age.
Most of my train friends today are my parents age or at least within 10 years of that age. As I have stated numerous times on this forum, I never left this hobby which is different from most of my friends in the hobby today. My core interests in the hobby have never changed, but overall, my hobby has expanded greatly over the years on the roads I collect and model and the scales I model in.
The best friend I have in this hobby to this day is my father. Like any father - son relationship it really grew when I became an adult, but we have always shared the hobby like he did with his father. He built our first permanent layout in HO that was in the house I grew up in for almost 20 years. To this day we spend most of our time talking about trains, our recent finds, and projects we are working on. I have a modular layout that I cannot set up at my home currently, so it is going to my parents' house in the near future to get some use.
