Techno-Toys Can’T Derail Electric Trains

Pay attention, cyber punks.

The immortal Johnny Cash never heard no PlayStation 2 a’comin’.

We may be stuck in a megabyte age, but the public still has a Boxcar Willie-sized love of those toy choo-choo trains that go rolling ‘round the basement bend.

Just ask Jeremy Milne.

The Spokane beer delivery man braved slick, snowy roads Saturday to revisit a piece of his childhood at the Great American Train Show.

Inside the Expo Center at the Spokane County Fairgrounds, dozens of Northwest vendors gathered to hawk electric trains, track, fake foliage and all the other bells and whistles that go with this century-old hobby.

The show features elaborate layouts and workshops. The show continues today from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $6. No charge to kids under 12.

To people like Milne, 27, there is still powerful magic in riding the miniature rails.

“My Dad had a Lionel set that he put up under the Christmas tree,” he says. “I’ve got one down there now.”

Milne brought along Connor, his 2-year-old boy. The father is upfront about wanting to get his son started on this wholesome, productive fun.

“Nowadays, adults are so busy they don’t have the half-hour or hour it takes to sit down and set up a train set,” he says.

“It’s easier to take two seconds and plug in a video game. But a train set will give you so much more quality time with your child.”

Despite all the hype given computer games these days, low-tech trains aren’t as outmoded as many might suspect.

According to Friday’s USA Today, American icon Lionel, which turns 100 this Christmas, is touting 2000 as its biggest sales year.

“People still like to get down on their hands and knees and play with the little trains,” Illinois businessman Bill Grove says. His Great American Train Show company held 72 events this year similar to the stop in Spokane.

This is a flea market catering to every level of railroad enthusiast.

Here you can find friendly faced Thomas trains simple enough for a toddler to run. Or you can enter the anal-retentive realm where only hobbyists of loco motives wind up.

In one section selling train antiques, two older men in caps and hunting jackets were embroiled in a deep discussion of the “rosy, mauve pattern” of a particular pattern of dining car dinner plates.

In another location, a gray-bearded gent wearing a black ballcap held up a tool and asked a dealer, “Does this work better on flex track than putting it into a mitre box?”

Oregon’s Bev Gemeinhardt spent 10 years creating a miniature three-ring circus that serves as one of the backdrops to the trains owned by her husband, Dick.

Her circus is an exact and detailed wonder, filled with cavorting elephants and a hand-sewn big top.

When will the madness end? “Never,” she says. “It wouldn’t be any fun if it was done.”

Looking for a train flick?

Check out the display featuring such classics as “Train Wrecks, Crashes and Disasters” or the largely unappreciated “Danger on the Curves.”

There are vintage transformers at $70 to $275 a pop. That bag of the aforementioned faux foliage will cost you $9.59.

There are teensy lights and decals and buttons and badges and wood whistles and engineer caps and even bottles of snow for $6.89, a tough sell considering the weather.

What is this fascination with trains?

You certainly don’t see this level of nostalgia gushing over, say, the bus industry. Thank God.

But the chattering steel wheels of yore have found a mythic place in the national psyche.

Because of that, it will take a lot more than computers and video games to derail the beloved toy train.

“I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about it that just draws you,” says Kathy Geoghegan of the Great American Train Show.

“It might start with a train running around a Christmas tree. After that, you’re hooked.”