My GF, with a lot of hinting, got me a toy train

I looove trains. I've had a couple cheesy N-scale setups in the past but I wanted to move up to HO scale and get some quality stuff so that some time soon I can do more of a 'real' semi-permanent setup complete with little fake scenery and stuff.

Turns out these suckers have gotten really high tech in the past 15 years or so. Now it's all DCC digital control (fixed track voltage with a digital signal superimposed on it that tells the 'smart' locomotive what you want it to do). You can have multiple trains on the same tracks running at the same time and control them independently from the same box (you pick which one you're currently commanding by address). You can have sound modules in them that play very realistic train sounds. You can even program in things like max acceleration and deceleration rates to simulate the momentum and slow responsiveness of a heavy train.

Anyway, she spent quite a bit of $$ and got me a brand new (i.e. it just came out last week) Bachmann train with all these sound effects etc, a good (and expandable) Digitrax Zephyr controller, and a good starter set of snap together track.

A vid with very annoying "you didn't pay for the file conversion software yet" logo in it HERE