If you're looking for a great gift for your child this year, look no further than Fisher Price's excellent Geotrax toy line. Geotrax toy sets are a collection of interchangeable roads, railway tracks, buildings, and trains that form an interconnected community.
They made their market debut in 2003 and since then have expanded their line aggressively in order to add more interesting features to their kits and to expand the layout options available to young engineers. There are both manual and automatic Geotrax trains available.
The kid-powered trains come in two varieties: the standard push-and-go type, and the battery operated lights and sounds type. The automatic toys consist of both planes and trains that operate via a remote control. The play sets can be divided into five broad categories:
Rail play sets
Rescue play sets
Construction play sets
Elevation play sets
Air and Sea play sets
Due to the modular nature of the Geotrax ecosystem, sets can be mixed and matched at will to form varying levels of track layouts. These layouts are built around the five kinds of play sets mentioned above, and are a hot topic among enthusiasts, who swap and share layout ideas with fellow enthusiasts.
With the various kinds of interchangeable tracks that are provided with the kits, a young builder can use his or her imagination to create a virtual town in a multitude of different ways. As builders get more advanced, elevation packs and switches are available to create incredibly complex multi-tiered, serpentine, interwoven track segments. A popular YouTube video shows one enthusiast who built a layout more than eight feet high!
Geotrax toys have attracted a large following among children and adults alike. After all, it's not every day that you come across a toy that is both fun and interesting, and challenging at the same time.
