Disaster averted

I admire your restraint, at least you didn't have to carry him out! LOL

Suggestion...Try asking him how high does he think you can throw his video game, smart phone or whatever he cares about! 

Tom 

I would have asked for his smartphone and done one thing, gone into settings and reset the phone to factory default, then given it back to him while asking how fast can you get all your contacts, games and Apps back on your phone. Nephew or no Nephew I don't put up with kids who purposely disregard what you explain to them and do what they want to do.

I would go back and put a maximum speed on my engines.

You showed a great deal of restraint.

How to NOT help to get a kid interested in trains!  Solution?  Keep a "beater" train handy for when you're showing the layout to youngsters.

Pete

Just a suggestion, before I handed over my Cab1 to a kid, I made sure to set the max speed on the engine so that wouldn't happen.

Texas Pete posted:

How to NOT help to get a kid interested in trains!  Solution?  Keep a "beater" train handy for when you're showing the layout to youngsters.

Pete

Sorry, I'll have to disagree here.  Letting him wreck a beater is not the answer, at least IMO.  That's like teaching someone to drive,  get a beater and take him to an empty lot and ask how fast the car will go.

This is a difficult topic that I have struggled with for years. I'm going to attempt not to ramble.

First, I have two children. Elyssa is 13 and Bryan is 11. I can trust them around and with my trains (when they are interested). I can also trust them in other peoples homes and with more expensive things. This is due in no small part to the way my wife and I have raised them. There is also a certain degree of their temperament in this as well.

I have attempted several times to introduce other children to the trains. This, more often than not, did not go well. I had two open houses at Christmas for my son's Cub Scout pack. The first went relatively well with only a few "please don't touch" comments and the kids enjoyed watching the trains and blowing the whistle, along with a few trackside accessories that I had buttons hooked up for. The parents were also respectful, and stayed around the kids. The second time did not, with several children not listening, their parents not attending (amongst other behavior), and I decided that unknown folks were no longer welcome in our home.

We also had numerous open-houses over the years. Those have been scaled back to family and close-friends only. Children are no longer allowed to touch the trains at these events outside of designated push-buttons or the whistle.

My advice for one attempting to introduce a child to this would be the same as if handing them anything expensive: these are the rules, this is how one treats it, and if they can't obey then the engagement is over. Frankly, a 10 year-old show know better. Really young kids get a pass from me. For them a loop of track on the floor and a "beater" of some kind is appropriate. That's how I introduced my kids and when they wanted some nicer items I started to introduce the rules around them.

Lol!!!  I like the resetting the phone to factory default idea, dang I wish I would have thought of that.  as for him and video games, he is into sports, I could have deflated his football, or removed the laces from his baseball glove.  That SD70 was one of my UP heritage edition locomotives.  If it had hit the floor I would have been sick.  My brother would have then been sick as he would have had to pay for it.  I have now set maximum speed on my locos. 

I know it's been said here but set maximum speed!!!  If you have the free app, you can't and that is actually a gripe I have with the free app.  MTH, if you are reading this, please add the max speed setting in the free app.  Or, and some may disagree with me, but even a non-setable max speed of 40 or 50 SMPH would be better than the default of 120.

I do like the factory reset of the smartphone though :-D

Tony

In all my years of doing train shows with a traveling layout, the number one question from kids by far was "How fast will they go?"

There is a huge disconnect in the hobby now between what impresses adults and what impresses kids. We see that here on the forum now all the time. Probably the number question here would be "Is that accurate scale?" I'm not passing judgement, but what impresses young kids in trains is not the same as what impresses adults.

On my traveling layout, I had banked 027 curves and frequently used the B-U post setting of the 1033 transformer, pretesting everything being taken to a show to make sure nothing flew off the track. Operating cars were also in abundance. And I made sure every single kid who wanted to run the trains got the chance to do so.

At several shows, my layout was near larger layouts with full-scale trains with Legacy and DCS. And yet people - especially people with children - came back again to tell me my layout was the best at the show, and to thank me for being the ONLY person at the show to allow their kids to run the trains.

Gunrunnerjohn, I don't believe Texas Pete is suggesting allowing a kid to wreck a train engine. What he's saying is to keep something around for the kids that is less detailed, more rugged and thus more forgiving of an accident.

And I'm not knocking the original post. Obviously a well detailed layout that appeals to adult interests in the hobby is all fine and good. It just might not be the same layout that would impress a child. And we keep saying we need growth in the hobby. Lionel sure recognizes this, as do the other companies at least by the statements made by their owners.

Unfortunately, asking a kid how high you can throw his video game, or whatever he cares about, in the air isn't helpful either. The sad reality is the kid wouldn't care about something his/her parent didn't buy for them in the first place. And in my observation. that's because many single parents are more interested in buying their child an electronic babysitter, than actually taking the time to raise and engage their children.

And I was at the mall last weekend... a rare event for me.  I was shocked. Every where I looked, people had their heads down staring at their cell phones. And it wasn't just kids! There were just AS MANY adults walking around, totally oblivious to their surroundings.

Technology can be like any drug... you don't know you're addicted to it until it is too late.

And I was at the mall last weekend... a rare event for me.  I was shocked. Every where I looked, people had their heads down staring at their cell phones. And it wasn't just kids! There were just AS MANY adults walking around, totally oblivious to their surroundings.

I see more "adults" fiddling with electronic devices and talking on cell phones while driving than teens.,

I set the maximum speed on all of my locomotives to 45 SMPH. I also set the acceleration rate to 1.

gunrunnerjohn posted:

Texas Pete posted:

How to NOT help to get a kid interested in trains!  Solution?  Keep a "beater" train handy for when you're showing the layout to youngsters.

Pete

Sorry, I'll have to disagree here.  Letting him wreck a beater is not the answer, at least IMO.  That's like teaching someone to drive,  get a beater and take him to an empty lot and ask how fast the car will go.

Didn't mean to imply let the kid wreck the train.  Just have a train handy that won't be a tragedy in case the worst happens and, like others have said, reduce the top speed setting.

Pete

Just watch kids get off the bus.  3 out of 4 are texting as they step off.  I love that video of the guy walking in the mall texting and he runs right into the fountain and falls in.  Better luck next time with the kid.  My son had absolutely no interest in my layout.  Said it was boring. Much more fun when you can go fast and crash them I guess.

I have a Fastrack loop on the carpet under the layout. I have a box of people, police and fire vehicles, school, dairy barn and cows, and a section of road. I have a Williams GP38 wired in series and cheaper cars run by a KW. The worst that has happened is the whistle lever gets pulled off. I have been down to 2 year olds without anything but enjoyment for all of us.

Without thinking about it, I was reticent to let a child run the trains. But the club guys came over once and a neighbor boy who was interested visited also. One of the guys, an 86 YO train guy gave the boy his controller and showed him how to use it. I learned something there...so now I do the same. Once with a bunch of family here I gave two grandsons the controllers and went in the living room to visit the adults. My one son remarked "Did Dad just do what I thought I saw him do?" I haven't been unlucky enough to have a max speed runner, but the layout is set up well enough to prevent anything flying off onto the floor. 

I do kind of enjoy fixing things...luckily Lionel helps me by furnishing lots of product that need it new right out of the box.

I am guessing that when most of us were kids if we had done something like that we would likely have been strapped till we couldn't sit down, especially if the train had gotten away and been damaged. Arguably the problem today is most kids are being raised using reasoning, negotiation, and "time-out". There seems to be very little accountability or consequences for bad behavior, so kids get away with a lot more than we ever did. I see this big time with my grandchildren, but you dare not interfere.

In the original post the kid in question sounds like he needs a serious attitude adjustment. He would not be invited back to my house, or at least to the train room, that's for sure. On the other hand he undoubtedly has an I-pad of his own, so when you put that on the table he would be right at home and want to see "what she will do", especially if he's a natural born troublemaker. Just MHO. It's a no-win.

Rod

   Any possibility of "accidental" presumption of permission on his part, or was it pure attitude? At that age, I i.d. them as a "a destroyer"or"a builder" take note, act accordingly, and hope for change. It sounds like it might be better if he stayed home, next time at least.

   It also sounds like he needs an indestructible cast magnetraction steamer with 027 curves, to experience and learn from rollovers on his own. Maybe some costs and value possibilities put into perspective?

   Pay him a visit and bring some snips to cut the cord on something of his. (something you can repair, or have a replacement for, but make him sweat it, lol)

   I always wanted "How fast" to be demonstrated, or at least answered literally. Though I would not have reached for the throttle, I might have got bored and slunk away to the tv (or a game on a phone today).

    Going 25 scale mph is a acquired taste for some; a Hudson or carbody...or Marx tin at 90mph might go over better with some visitors, especially the young. You've found at least one of them anyhow...he did show interest, right?.

   Speed is attractive, so is low end power. But pullinv power is more difficult to convey signs easily noticed, so high speeds visual impact is no supriss. I.e. He might not even have a firm grasp on torque and other values like centrifugal force in curves, but he knows speed already. Inercia and momentums are best learned by experience . So is respect. You did no wrong,

Texas Pete posted:

How to NOT help to get a kid interested in trains!  Solution?  Keep a "beater" train handy for when you're showing the layout to youngsters.

brianel_k-lineguy posted:

In all my years of doing train shows with a traveling layout, the number one question from kids by far was "How fast will they go?"

First off, I don't have a 'beater' anything on my layout. Also, my layout is point-to-point, not a loop, so sooner or later a crash it going to happen. Besides, my layout isn't exactly built with kid-proof stuff. The structures and scenery were made to not be easily damaged, but the trees and small details could easily take a beating from a kid's hands.

Yeah, the "how fast will it go?" is always the question I'm asked by kids. I have it wired to DCC and even at max speed, a train won't go off the rails on a curve as it's going nowhere as fast as many 3-rail 'racetrack' display layouts I've seen.

Clint, you did indeed show an amazing level of restraint. Ignore all the 'suggestions' for retaliation posted here. If you reset his phone or did anything like that, YOU will be considered the bad guy here, and for all time. You don't need that within your family. A kid does stupid stuff but an adult should know better, that's how pretty much any parent will see that. And if the kid had wrecked your locomotive, would you brother really have paid for the damages? I of course don't know him but I wouldn't bet a nickel on him even offering to pay for the damages. I can hear it now, "If you knew it'd do this, you shouldn't have allowed him to touch anything," even though he snatched the throttle from you.

Did anyone sit down with the kid and explain what he almost did? That's what my folks would have done, putting it into context (and yeah, also beat me within an inch of my life when we got home, but we all know parents can't do that anymore). I've observed that parents rarely ever seem to tell the kid they did- or almost did- mess something up and what the damage would have or did cost, anymore. And NOBODY offers to pay for damages. Ever. How many times have we all seen kids screw something up at a public event and the parent doesn't even dream of offering to pay and usually flips the responsibility onto the owner somehow? Don't blame the kids 100% for that, as any kid from any era would get away with whatever people will allow them to!

Kids are like puppys, some are house broken, some are not.  

I often show the younger children how to run my trains using the old MTH handheld controller.  It is a little more difficult to get the trains moving at a high rate of speed.  The older kids are allowed to use the mobile application.   I also explain to the children that the trains are expensive and they need to be handled carefully.   It sounds like you attempted to explain this to the child and he did not listen.  Thus, escorting him out of the train room was the proper thing to do.   

On a side note, I've accidentally increased my train speed to 120 MPH numerous times.   The "+" icon is very close to the "120" icon.   I usually hit the 120 button by accident when attempting to increase speed and the train takes off!  Emergency stop is a great thing.....

I think it is more an indictment of the kid then it is of all young people. I do think young kids love speed, I can remember at that age running my trains as fast as I could on the straights, and then seeing how fast I could hit the curves, and yep had rollovers...but those were my trains, too, and that was a bit of a different time, before these things became collectors items. 

The problem here is the kid didn't respect that they weren't his, assumed he could do that, and that is wrong. I had friends of mine when I was young who did crap like that with my trains, so it isn't just modern kids, there were plenty of kids in our generation who were just as stupid. 

Once that happened, I would ask the kid to leave the train room and I would talk to both him and his parents, telling them I love to show my trains off and have the kid have some fun, too, but having fun doesn't mean the kid can do what they want, either, that I expect common respect and courtesy. I agree the real problem is the parents, the wanting to see things go fast is typical of young kids (don't believe me? My son is a serious violin student, graduates this year from a conservatory, and when he was younger, talking 10,11 years old, the teachers used to scream all the kids wanted to do was play fast *lol*), the bad behavior is in acting on that with someone else's stuff. 

In my day I saw the same thing when we first started driving, some of the kids I was friends with had some pretty fast cars, some muscle cars, couple of corvettes, some foreign sports cars, and they all shared stories of letting other kids drive the car who proceeded to drive like a ***** (fill in your favorite curse, latin expression, etc). When I drove their cars, I was very careful with them, didn't try to burn the tires, was careful with shifting on manuals (especially since some of them had transmissions with, let's just say, slightly dodgy synchros), because it wasn't my car......so it isn't just the youth of today, it is about how they were raised and so forth. 

I totally can understand why the OP would be angry, he has every right to be, I was more answering the idea I hear all the time from people with trains, saying they won't show them to kids because all the young people today are disrespectful, don't respect people's property and the like, what that translates to me is an excuse to not even try (which sadly, based on personal experience, a lot of club and individual layout owners who feel they should show the trains off and get kids interested but don't really want to, use as an excuse). My take is it is better to take precautions to protect against the rowdy ones, in the hope that some of the kids might actually get the bug

This thread cracks me up. Reminds me of when I was a kid and my neighbor yelling at me to get off his grass...

I set my son up when he was 5, gave him a low cost TMCC engine and a string of cars to take on the layout... its human nature to see how fast anything will go. I planned ahead with my remote control power cut off switch.

I had him traveling down the rail as an expert engineer in 15 minutes... then he starting pointing at the high dollar engines on the shelf... "that my son you can run when your 10" I said.

P51 great advice.  While I do chuckle at some of the suggestions, I wouldn't retaliate, only in my mind.  I'm a high school teacher, so believe me, I know about restraint.  Fortunately, my nephew doesn't visit often.  And I don't have any "beaters" on my layout either.  Now, I will open another can of worms.  In a dog fight between a P51 and an fw190, I would put my money on the fw190.

When trains were for kids, those were the days. My first set was a small one by Marx. Did I put stuff on the track and smash into it? You bet! Cranked it up and ran it off the rails. Of course it only rolled over as far as the floor it was set up on. Now fess up, you all did. The thing was that those toys could take whatever kids could dish out. All those locos with the dented roof edges, how do you think that happened? We all grow out of that sooner or later. The nephew should have been given an inexpensive set to play with when he was 4 or 5 and he would be more 'adult' with uncle's toys today.

bigkid posted:

 

The problem here is the kid didn't respect that they weren't his, assumed he could do that, and that is wrong. I had friends of mine when I was young who did crap like that with my trains, so it isn't just modern kids, there were plenty of kids in our generation who were just as stupid. 

In my day I saw the same thing when we first started driving, some of the kids I was friends with had some pretty fast cars, some muscle cars, couple of corvettes, some foreign sports cars, and they all shared stories of letting other kids drive the car who proceeded to drive like a ***** (fill in your favorite curse, latin expression, etc). When I drove their cars, I was very careful with them, didn't try to burn the tires, was careful with shifting on manuals (especially since some of them had transmissions with, let's just say, slightly dodgy synchros), because it wasn't my car......

Funny how that works that people forget that when they get to be a certain age. An uncle of mine told me when I was a kid, that when I got older I would think that the generation after mine has gone to heck and that mine was the last generation who respected their elders, had a good work ethic, etc. I'll be darned if he wasn't right, as when I got into my 30s, I started seeing what he meant. It's biological, I think.

Mr Union Pacific posted:

In a dog fight between a P51 and an fw190, I would put my money on the fw190.

That would depend on who was flying it. Check out what happened in the 50s and 60s in the wars in Central America, which were mostly fought with WW2 US planes. Or the fledgling Israeli AF, and how they littered the desert with busted up 'superior' airplanes of their various enemies. You can't count on the victor based along on what they were flying. I know of some pilots who could probably take out an F-35 flying a Cessna with BB guns mounted on the wings...

I think of the Adams Family Show when Gomez would purposely blow up a bridge or wreck one train into another.  As a child, I loved it.  Not so much today. 

Seems to my memory that at 10 crashing trains was the goal.

Bogie

Right you are on that "who's flying".  Actually, (no laughing) my favorite aircraft is and always has been....the ju87 Stuka. A P51 pilot would probably feel sorry for the Stuka crew and let them go...lol.

I have spent a lifetime teaching kids. That young man needs to feel a consequence. Fast.

When my brother and l went through our model airplane phase as kids, he favored the P-51, and l the P-38.  Later l built models of German WWIi aircraft, because there were many "odd" ones, including an asymnetrical one, a Herschel, l think, but have forgotten.  One of the books l have stated that the German pilots feared the P-38 and called it "the fork-tailed devil,".  Teufel is devil in German, but l have forgotten the modifier, also.  Devils apparently come in assorted sizes and ages, from what l read above. Teufel is pronounced, "toy-full", and l think that describes some basements out there (that you might want to keep certain visitors out of)

Lol very true Colorado Hi Railer, very true.