Tunnel Vision: A Toddler's Train Obsession

By Brendan O'Hallarn Wednesday, September 08, 2010

We’re in Canada again. We’re up north this time for my Grandmother’s 100th birthday, which was Sunday in Elliot Lake, Ont.

As usual, our awesome travel kids were troupers during the 900-mile drive from Williamsburg to Northern Ontario. And that was even with our rookie mistake: We forgot Percy.

Do you have a son under age 8? Then you’ll know that Percy is one of the happy trains on the Thomas and Friends series. He’s green. My son latches onto him every day like he’s a life preserver on a sinking boat.

And we forgot him for our 900-mile driving trip.

“Puh-seee! Puh-seeeeeeh!! PUH-SEEEEEEE!!!!!!!”

At Target in Fredericksburg, we fined ourselves $12 and Percy magically appeared again for the rest of the trip north. It got me thinking.

Just about every other boy our son’s age that we know has the same train addiction. Two more examples of my son’s ardor:

There’s a burger joint north of Toronto, called Webers. Everyone in Toronto who can afford it has a cottage in the Muskokas, two hours north. Every person who has a cottage in the Muskokas stops at Webers every time they go. It’s a zoo.

The booming burger joint has given Paul Weber enough money that he’s indulged his train fantasies by purchasing a bunch of railway cars for the diners to sit in. My son went bananas, and sobbed and sobbed when it was time to go.

Of course, we indulge the obsession as well. On Monday, we took him on the Agawa Canyon Tour Train from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. My son stood the entire 114-mile trip to the canyon, and then sprinted around the train for the entire hour and a half stopover. Then he slept like a champ all the way back to the Sault.

Here’s the point that I’m taking my sweet time making – why do little kids have such positive associations with trains, when adults’ exposure to them is stories about cost overruns for the light rail in Norfolk, or derailments that spill toxic chemicals into rivers, or train operators falling asleep and causing fatal collisions?

Nothing so ghastly happens to Thomas and his friends on Sodor Island. But they do deal with the day-to-day struggles of a busy train network. And they work together like “useful little engines” and get the job done. The kids eat it up.

The train is FUN. Driving a car in a traffic jam is not. As our cities grow, expanding rail service makes a heck of a lot more sense than building more and more highways.

I wonder, in fact I hope, that my son and all his friends keep their good feelings about trains into adulthood.

Because if he was in charge of urban planning, we’d have a heck of a lot more trains to ride.

Brendan O’Hallarn writes Tunnel Vision for WYDaily. If you have a transportation issue you’d like to discuss, write Brendan at brendan@wydaily.com.