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Dear chinatrain99, Welcome home, my fellow O-gauger. Lionel's cheaper steamers are always a good place to start. They can survive just about any derailment, fall, most collisions, and maybe a few 1:48 inter-planetary cataclisms (I have one, 11 years old, which has fallen off of tressles, derailed more times than I can count, crashed into the wall many times, and still runs like new. Sorry, but I haven't been able to put one through an inter-planetary cataclisms.). In addition, the traditional O Lionel 4-4-2 can go around curves which are very sharp in HO!!! However, they have less apealing aspects as well. Firstly, they rarely come with some sort of control other than merely adjusting the transformer. They also are very unprototypical. Now, if you want to have the nostalgic feeling of the Lionel train on a snowy Christmas..., then more power to you. But being as you've been in N and HO, you probably would like something which rivet-counters won't have a huge laugh over. And, while Lionel's products are almost always of high quality, you can often get a similar product for less money from K-Line or MTH. K-Line makes a USRA light 2-8-2 for $500, or I believe $625 with smoke, railsounds, command control, directional lighting, and every other thing you could possibly have a use for. It is O scale, and I believe runs on O-42 curves. MTH makes three lines of O-gauge products. The first is Tinplate, which is the line of reproductions of the original tinplate trains of long ago. These look little like any real train, but to those who like tinplate, the toylike quality is one of the appeals. The second line is Premier, which is scale equipment. It is some of the highest quality in all of O, but also costs quite a bit. The last O line produced by MTH is Railking, which is the line of non- and semi- scale equipment. It also costs much less. As for your question regarding track, I'll make it short and sweet-you won't escape track cleaning in O. I hope I have helped, Daniel
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