Dhano923's Full Review: Fisher Price GeoTrax: Grand Central Station Rail a...
A few months ago, just before his 4th birthday, my son told us he wanted a new train set. He originally had a train table with a wooden track and train pieces, but after almost 2 years of sitting in our living area and only being played with a handful of times, we thought he wasn't into trains. We ended up getting rid of it and thought we were done. Until he went to Toys R Us with grandma and spotted the Geotrax system on display. That is what he had to have for his 4th birthday.
We decided to start off with a small, all inclusive set and chose the Grand Central Station set. We liked that it had several pieces of track, the main station area, and then several accessories, such as a passenger train with cars, an additional cargo train with car, several small people/figures and other accessory pieces that add to the experience. We realized that what bored my son about the wooden train set he had was that he had to push it around to make it go -- the Geotrax trains were remote controlled. What 4 year old doesn't like remote controlled items?
On his birthday, we gave him the set. His eyes lit up and he wanted to set the track up. We followed the picture on the box and set it up the same way. We put the small people in the trains, set the cargo pieces in the cargo train, put a couple other people on the station platform, and started the passenger train up by pressing the button on the engine and then pressing the trigger on the remote. There it went! My son loved it, and my husband too! They both sat there watching the train go around, then reconfiguring the track to make something new and doing it over and over again. (we had also bought some additional track pieces so they had plenty to work with). They worked the cargo elevator, pushed the cargo train (the cargo train is not remote controlled), and made the passenger train conductor usher the people in and out of the cars.
I love that the track pieces are sturdy enough for my son to put together, but easy enough for him to pull apart too. In fact, my 2 year old can also put together and take apart pieces without too much problem, which is great for when they are playing together. The remote control has 3 settings: forward, stop and reverse, which is perfect for children in this age range.
The nice thing about this set is that you can keep adding on other pieces to expand the set. We've added several items such as the Quarry and the Bridge, as well as more track pieces. An average track configuration in our house is about 6 feet by 4 feet with all the parts and pieces!
While the set does go through batteries pretty quickly in our house, it does get a lot of use. We've been using rechargable batteries to avoid buying batteries too often. Despite this small con, I would definitely recommend the Geotrax Grand Central Station playset to any child who loves trains and imaginary play.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 40 Type of Toy: Trains
Age Range of Child: 3 to 5 Years
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