Thanks, Rich!
Once in awhile I get lucky and hit the nail rather than my entire thumb!
Even though I had Marx and Lionel as a kid and got hooked on three-rail very early, I did have friends whose parents, for whatever reasons, started them out on two-rail Flyer trains instead of the more well known and popular Lionel, or the less costly products of Louis Marx and Company.
Playground disagreements about the virtues of two versus three aside, I confess I was always a little jealous of the fact that my pals' Flyer trains had the same number of parallel rails as the 1:1 Union Pacific and Great Northern roads which served our little wheat-growing town in eastern Washington! They always won the prototypical accuracy argument by default, but were able to back it up with articles about the relative realism of Flyer track in the Gilbert catalog if the obvious wasn't persuasive enough.
Playing with my buddies' trains after school also hooked me on cedar-scented smoke. Even these days, when I'm strolling through the Orange Hall at York, a whiff of that nostalgic stuff always draws me inexorably towards the smoke fluid dealers' booths. Only there can I relive treasured olfactory toy train moments from my youth. Nothing propels imagination quite like aroma!
PoeticallyAromaticBear
