Hi folks,
I'm hoping someone out there can help me. I had a favorite toy train set as a kid - and I don't mean favorite like "I have vague fond memories of it", I mean favorite like I played with it for five hours a day for six years when I was a kid. Now I've got a nephew and I'd kill to get him a similar set - and to get the chance to play with it myself again - but I can't find it online and I have no idea what it was called.
The set was colorful plastic and had a battery powered locomotive with a spinning gear under the locomotive that made contact with the track in each module and caused them to do things. For example, one track section was a gondola. The train would drive onto the gondola, and then the gear would make contact with the track and cause the gondola to pull itself up its string and release the train on a higher track. Another section was a little simulated river that the train would cross on a raft. All in tacky plastic, of course, but it was mind blowing for me.
I think that my grandparents sent the train back to the US from a trip in Europe, so it might have been European (Swedish? Norwegian?) but I might be misremembering that. I was a kid in the late eighties and early nineties, so that was the era.
I know someone out there must know what these great trains were called! Thanks in advance for your help!