My grandson will be five in June. He is obsessed with trains (especially steam trains).
When he was a little over a year old I had just discovered Mike Armstrong's videos on YouTube. I was at my desktop computer watching "California Trains" when Connor came over and wanted to sit in my lap and watch. The video is an hour long. He watched it for 45 minutes.
Then came the Thomas videos when he was home with my daughter and her husband. And also the Mike Armstrong "Steam Trains Galore" videos. When he was two years old he got a hand me down Thomas and Brio set with a table that had storage drawers for the wooden trains. His second, third, and fourth birthdays were all train themes. The summer after his second birthday I brought him on a steam train ride and made a DVD of it for him to have. He still watches it. Every Christmas he would spend hours in front of the N Gauge two tier layout I set up for the holidays. And, of course under the layout were MP3 tracks from Mike Armstrong videos coming through two sets of computer speakers. One for the steam train tier and the other for the diesel tier.
By the time he was four he no longer wanted to watch "trains with faces". He only wanted to watch real ones. By then I had dug out the Lionel trains I had as a kid and began restoring them with Connor attentive enough to spend an hour watching me solder, sand, etc. He told his mother that he wanted a "remote control train" for Christmas (2020). They live in an apartment in Queens so she asked me which ones to get him. In the end she wanted the O Gauge (despite the extra space it took up) so after the wonderful help I got from forum members here he had a great starter set with lots of fun things to go along with it.
Now that he is approaching five he still cannot get enough YouTube videos of real trains, O guage trains, and N Gauge trains. He can run a bluetooth app to control his trains, a bluetooth app to control my Arduino based DCC N Gauge trains, and of course a conventional throttle for both. When he is doing remote learning 60% of his answers are turned into some sort of a train theme or how whatever it is they are discussing is related to trains.
Every kid is different. In Connor's case I don't think I needed to get him interested in trains. He got me RE-interested in trains. His first word was "wheel" and trains had them. Maybe it was as simple as that.
John
