PCRR/Dave, You're right, kids are important to the hobby. I feel that exposure is the most important part. Of late, the big push is to get kids involved... which is good. We all know kids are going to like all sorts of things and most have a short attention span. We can't expect kids to go gaga over trains for the extent of their childhood. more importantly, we need to expose them to the trains and in a few years when the mature they will go back and say, "man, I remember playing with trains.... " and then start in the hobby themselves. I know that happened to me. The problem with the recent generations of collectors, when the values began to elevate, the era of "don't touch" was born. There were many lost opportunities for kids to play trains because some thought they were too valuable. When actually the value should have been put into the children. Now, we are suffering from that and trying to catch up.
Expose your trains to the youth and we shall get some of them back... eventually.
ARNO
