When I was a very young child we only saw the American Flyer train set at Christmas. They were still "dad's trains", and spent most of the rest of the year in boxes in the basement. About the time I started school however, my dad went to the trouble of laying down an extended oval of track with a single siding on a sheet of green 4 x 8 plywood mounted on table legs. He also constructed a crude unpainted plywood tunnel at one end. I don't know if he ever intended to do anything more with the layout, but for whatever reason that's where it all stopped. That is also about the point in time that it started to become "my" train. And for a year or so I had my own official Plywood Central.
It didn't last however, as our expanding family (2 boys and 4 girls) necessitated that my brother's and my bedroom be relocated to the very area of the basement where the "layout" stood. So the track and the plywood came up and the train went back in the boxes. Not such a sad ending though, the train set now became floor trains, where my brother, sisters, and I would construct fantastic villages of building blocks, and Lincoln logs in the middle of the basement floor, and run the train through it.
I would be a teenager before I was able to construct a proper layout again. This was in a different house, and in a different scale; N.