Hello Everyone
Well, for me, the train virus started when I was 6.
At the beginning, my parents bought me at Xmas a small Lima train set (2 rails DC).
My mother used to take me to look at department store windows, before Christmas, at Paris.
There were Marklin trains turning around and I was dreaming, but I had no idea of the price of such items.
Then later I moved from Paris to the Alps.
Fortunately, in this new location, there was a train store close to me, and I was very frequently discussing with the vendor, and asking him the permission to open the boxes of brand new train items...
From time to time, I bought a wagon or 2, and more exceptionally a loco. That was all Jouef brand.
When I was 10, I had 6 Lima/Jouef locos, 20 wagons, and a number of rails with switches and also some signals.
One day, my father got an old table (1m80 x 1m) and gave it to me, so I started immediately to build a fixed layout and experiment various track combinations, setting up signals, and operating the trains.
That was the 1st time I set a return loop, and I encountered the problem of + connected to -, needing to invert manually the polarity on the transformer when reaching the middle of the return loop (with cut rails implementation). I found this constraint really boring.
Then when I was 11, I met another kid at school, who had Marklin trains.
He invited me many times to play trains, and I discovered the unique advantage of 3 rails system (no more limitation to track combinations).
This was the revelation !
A few months after I decided to resell all my Jouef trains, and bought my first Marklin train set. I never went back.
I also quickly discovered Marklin prices were 3 or 4 times more expensive than Jouef.
I decided that when I'll be older I'll have a job earning enough money in order to bought some Marklin trains... And much later, I became a software engineer.
So for me, the real motivation to switch to Marklin was to solve a technical problem. Not very poetic, but it's my truth.
Cheers
Fabrice
