Not hijacking at all, Catdaddy! Thank you for posting!
My brother is a high school special education teacher and has to come up with ‘creative‘ lessons for his emotional disturbed kids. Your idea for trains in your lessons would fit the bill for creative. He has one more year before he retires at 62, and will be ready to go. As the older brother, I’ve been giving him things to consider.
Now I went off track. I think it would be a good idea to start a topic asking for ideas. There are other teachers here, and maybe some have already done something similar in class.