Toy Spotlight: Flexible Tracks
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If your kids like playing with cars or trains, then magic tracks are something they’ll enjoy.
Cars, trains, trucks, and anything that moves on four wheels are popular toys with young kids. Maybe it’s that they move and can be pushed, but whatever it is, they’ll sit and play with them for hours on end. There are other toys that kids will do the same with (see dolls and stuffed animals), and it’s always nice when you find those toys so that you can keep your kids entertained more easily.
If you’ve bought toy trains for your kids in the past, then you know that wooden train tracks are pretty popular and fairly widely available. The tracks themselves are pretty inflexible, but you can put them in different orientations and orders to make different tracks. They’re quite a bit of fun if you’ve never actually used them before.
The problem that we’ve found with the tracks is that we never have enough pieces. We’re always short by a few pieces, and so then we’re trying to completely reroute the whole track. This isn’t the end of the world of course, but it discourages the kids from wanting to play with them. The other issue with the wood tracks is that they have to sit on the floor, or if you have pieces that go up, you have to have something holding them. A little bump and you’re having to fix your train set again.
We recently stumbled across flexible tracks, which are really meant more for cars, but you can certainly run a train along them as well. There are a few different brands of these tracks, including Magic Tracks and Flex-Track, but the idea is the same for both of them. The tracks are flexible, and they can easily move into different shapes or directions.
They are flexible because they’re really just a ton of tiny track pieces put together, so they can easily bend and curve wherever you’d like. They can also go up and down in any location as well, so you can go back over the track you’ve already built in most any location that you’d like - you don’t need a special track piece to get up and over something.
Because they are flexible, you do need to make sure that you’re not making your curves/corners not too sharp as the cars will fall right off of them if you do. Not a big deal, but you’ll have to have some practice to figure out exactly what the angles look like.
The sets come with self driving cars as well, so you can just let them go at it at their own pace, or you can push your own car along as well. If you are using the self-driving cars, you’ll need to check your track angles to keep the cars on. It’s fun to let them race around and cross their paths with some of the sets available.
Overall, the flexible tracks are really easy to set up, and put away, while also letting your kids have a fun time with their cars. I’d definitely recommend giving them a try for your kids if they’re into those type of things.
