Have you ever seen your kid play gleefully with trains at book or toy stores? Enjoying every minute, right? We've got all the ingredients for that to work at home. A nice table, tons of track, lots of trains, other little houses and people that can you can setup around whatever track layout you can think. But here's the deal, I've never seen the kids really enjoy it.
Jack gets extremely frustrated. He tries to put the track together himself, which is awesome, but then of course it doesn't mate up, there's an upper elementary school level of geometry in the curves and length. or he'll use a track that I've put together and the whole track gets disconnected and comes apart. He gets angry, he grunts, he yells at the Thomas trains. It's sad to watch.
The difference is the track at the stores is completely glued down with bondo. Try lifting one of those tracks up, you'll lift the table before that track comes undone. So, we glued our track down. I bought some hardboard, cut it to size, and glued it on a 1/4" plywood sheet, also cut to size. Then the track went down and when I was happy with the form, I used some hot glue and a glue gun and cemented those suckers on the hardboard. It's great, less than $20, too. It has two bridges, two lifts, a couple circles; Jack (and the girls) can push Thomas and a massive number of trucks along the track and guess what? It doesn't come apart. They don't get frustrated.
The glue comes off easier than wood glue, but it takes some work. Jack still sets up the extra track on the floor or in the spare spaces around the table. He still gets to use his imagination, it's just now if he wants to play with a train on the track, he doesn't have to use his imagination that an earthquake came and superman had to put the thing back together.
Next I'm going to ask the girls to paint some landscaping with streams, trees, bushes, and the like on the hardboard. Then we'll scrape the glue and make a new track design for it and throw away the old hardboard, less than a few dollars. 4' by 8' sheets of hardboard are like $9.00.