Historic Model Trains
Kids in this day and age are a lot more involved in updating their face book page than in actually sticking their faces into a book. If it doesn’t connect to the power grid and add to the monthly electrical cost, lots of boys and girls are just not that into it. This is after all the internet age and if a child isn’t looking at three things at once he feels like he is slacking. But, as you know, the past is really a helpful thing for them know. It’s not enough to know that there were some guys named Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Benjamin who now have their faces on our money. I don’t mean to get on my soap box, but it’s our duty as patriotic Americans to pass on some sense of our vibrant traditions to them. So how do we get them to crack the book on the traditions of this country without feeling like we’re pulling teeth? There are lots of ways, but one particularly good way is through toy locomotives. Yes. Yeah, historic toy locomotives embody a vibrant history with them but don’t burden us with feeling that we are being educated. Try using toy trains to teach our traditions this way:
Use locomotives as a secret vehicle for history:
Try to make your lay out time and location specific. For example, let’s say that you decide to depict the American Southwest in the period just after the Civil War. You can get your young people to learn about this period and then add period details that will really add to the joy and historical accuracy of your modellayout. Imagine stringing up a long row of telegraph poles next to your track to depict the communications system of the time. A ghost town that failed to benefit on the railroad because it didn’t get a stop might be shown tantalizingly close to the track. Maybe even put in a representative robber baron looking over his train empire.
Historic toy trains are also a good alternative to the usual diorama or scale model:
Diorama and similar craft projects are fine but if you’ve already gotten your child into model locomotives why not take advantage of his or her hobby to really impress at his next school presentation. You will need to lay it out on a portable display table and possibly help your child bring it in on the day that it is due, but the combination of historic detail and the interest that such trains inspire simply by themselves are likely to really go over well. Just imagine, for example, adding a model train display to your kid’s essay on Jesse James. You could show the robber awaiting the period specific locomotive with his whole gang and also show other aspects of this vibrant period of American the past. It’s your kid though, who will be robbing that A right out of his teacher’s grade book!
Visit Historic locomotive Locales:
There are also a few toy locomotive museums and other train related historic sites where you can see historic toy trains and some real locomotives as well. If your local historic locomotive site doesn’t have model locomotives consider suggesting they incorporate some to the curator or manager of the site. In some places, toy locomotive clubs often put on toy locomotive events.. Just google it and you are sure to come into contact with your local toy locomotive society.
Whatever you choose to do, you will find that model trains are a door to history even if you don’t explicitly use them as such. Just being familiar with different varieties of trains gets us one step closer to understanding their development and the great the past that goes with it.
Here is more information on Model Steam Trains. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Model Trains.
Comments
Leave a Reply