How you got into the range?

[MrNormalDraws]

So I don't know if anybody made a similar post here or not, but I wanna start on the topic on how any of you got into the range, or just the hobby in general. I'll start with my story.

Exposure
I was into model trains at a very young age thanks to my parents getting me tapes about the hobby and wanted to try it out myself (eg. I Love Toy Trains), but my family never had the income for it. In fact, I remember when I was 3-4 years old that my parents were in a hobby store and there was a big Lionel Thomas set that I wanted it, but my parents didn't want to get it.

I may've first heard of the Bachmann Thomas range when I was in the fourth grade after one of my siblings got a Thomas magazine that showed some products such as Tomy and Wooden Railway, and I thought the Bachmann looked good but I wasn't into Thomas that much at the time. But what got me into it was during 2005 after looking at Sodor Island Fansite's content about Thomas and that was when I saw CaptainPunjab's "Thomas the Bachmann Model" series. Then again in the summer of 2007 after I got my interest of Thomas back that I saw more content using the Bachmann range and later found out about Hornby as well, thanks to the likes of DaWillstanator (when he used to be in the fandom), Trainboy7, HenryBlue and Dan Snell. It was on Christmas that year that I wanted a Bachmann Thomas set to start out, so my mom bought a basic circle set that comes with Thomas and his two coaches and also got Percy and two wagons to go along and I enjoyed playing with the train set a lot. What I didn't expect was how small they were considering I'm more used to the larger scale trains I've seen at stores and videos. Throughout the next few years I expanded some of my fleet of engines and rolling stock and enjoyed playing with them.

Decline and Re-entrance
But sadly my interest of the hobby didn't last that long for a while. It happened once the 2010s started when things went a bit sour for my family and because of it, I never had time playing with the trains like I used to and we had to put them away in storage. And because my family moved so much that I have a feeling the models (at least the engines) probably don't work as they used to. So how I got back into the hobby recently? Well, you can thank James May for that, as I watched an episode of "The Reassembler" where he took apart his Flying Scotsman model and fix it up that I was interested in the hobby again. Plus because I have some disposable income from the online tasks I do on some gig sites that I wanted to buy a HO/OO train set for my birthday.  I decided to start out getting a Hornby Flying Scotsman set before I can get into the Thomas range again. It feels good going back into the hobby, though I wish I wasn't gone that long due to the fact some of the engines are discounted during my absence.

[railtwister]

Well over 10 years ago, bought my first THOMAS item on eBay, because I thought it would be fun to run on my club's modular layout when we displayed at shows (it was, and still is). At that time, the economy had tanked, and the prices on eBay were surprisingly low, so typically, I ended up getting carried away with my collecting. I was also into On30 at the time, and even used some of the THOMAS OO open wagons equipped with Kadee couplers behind my On30 Davenports and Porters, they seemed to make pretty good stand-ins for narrow gauge mining equipment. Whenever I got a new Thomas item, I would check the Wikipedia Thomas and Friends site to see the correct nomenclature for the real item it was based on, and then look up any info on the prototype. I was impressed by the adherence of the THOMAS serie's characters to the real trains in the UK. This led to an increased interest in British profile model trains, and just recently led to my first OO scale purchase from Hattons just over a month ago. I didn't foresee that first THOMAS purchase all those years ago leading to my getting interested in yet another model railroad scale.

Bill in FtL