Peanuts Begins by Charles Schulz for May 05, 2018

yeah, being a minimalist can be quite depressing

We all have to start small.

My Christmas layout was always down well before February. One had to make use of it while it was up. As to the theme here, yes, compared to my cousin’s layout mine always looked a bit peaked. He had a brother who would spend time and money, the latter something which we didn’t have much of.

Cheer up, Chuck, your windup set is fun! Kudos to Sparky for including the third rail on the trains in Panel One. :D

When I was a kid, my uncle had this huge train set on a big piece of plywood (or something like it) suspended above the floor of his basement. It was fantastic.

Shermy owns the Union Pacific, and Charlie owns the Cumbres and Toltec.

Looks like Shermy has an “O-scale” train set and Charlie Brown is stuck with starter “N scale”… both have their fans… oddly, this one is a lesson in being happy with what you have…

That last panel was me as well.

Poor Charlie can’t win.

Cheer up, Chuck. You have something that Shermy doesn’t. A future in the strip.

I would see how fast it would go before it left the tracks. And place my toy cowboys and horses on the track and crash into them. And Lincoln Logs, too.

Well, some kids have all the luck! Not even my brother’s train was that big, like Shermy. When he was a kid.

When I was little I had a wind-up toy train with a clacker on it, so it was a moving xylophone, and you could arrange the ties to make difference tunes.

Didn’t Charlie Brown just have a bigger train set in the May 03 cartoon?

How long does it take to set up / take down that layout in their living room? And how often do they do that, and for how long?

I’d rather improvise toys from stuff around me.