That just shows you were never taughtthe proper way to play with trains.
Or the opposite; that women apparently generally aren’t even curious about why men like the things they do and so never ask. No one’s stopping them from asking after all.
Far from what men do being “inherently cool and interesting and desirable”, the general message is that it’s either utterly boring, stupid or repulsive. In just this thread several posters have called machines boring and simple, not “cool and interesting”.
My problem with “tomboy” is that it is used way too often. I do believe gender non-conformity exists, but people tend to fixate on trivial things when making this determination. Like, a girl who doesn’t like pink isn’t a tomboy. She just doesn’t like a certain color. Same with a love for the outdoors and science fiction. If a girl wants to wear boys underwear and she prefers wrestling with her dolls versus acting out dramas with them, yeah, she’s probably on the masculine side. But it seems most times people throw out the term just to describe a girl who isn’t 100% “girly girl”.
I have a systemizing brain. As a kid, I liked taking things apart. Remote control cars, Barbie dolls, wind-up toys, you name it. I liked tearing up shit just to see what would happen. But I wasn’t into model trains. My brother had a set, and I vaguely remember playing with the loose pieces and parts. But I never had an urge to set it up and let it go for a spin. Because I liked taking things apart. Putting them together, however, was no fun. 
As a kid, I loved playing with technical Lego, taking things to bits and putting them back together, and I wanted to learn more mechanical stuff.
Problem was, no-one really encouraged me- I went to a girls’ school, which barely bothered with teaching any of that stuff (not so much in a ‘girls can’t do that’ way, in fairness, but it was very academic, not very practical), and people tended to just do stuff for me, rather than explain how, especially, oddly, as I got older. Something as simple as changing a tyre on the car took me years to ever do, because every time I needed to do it, some guy just stopped and took over. It’s really hard to keep up a vague interest when everyone just ignores it; I can’t say for sure that a guy would have got more encouragement, but it seems pretty likely to me.
I don’t think there’s anything ingrained about it all, I mean, as well as the horses changing from masculine interest to feminine, gardening has done a bit of a u-turn. I have an allotment garden- almost all the plotholders over 50 are male (my neighbour pointed this out, she’s the oldest female plotholder on site, out of 300+ people, and she’s a good 30 years younger than the oldest man), but most under about 35 are female.
Maybe in 200 years, men will be all making diamante dolphin pictures, and smirking at all the girly motorcycle mechanics… 
I am male (at least, I was the last time I checked… but it is the 21st century…) and I love machines and miniature gizmos and models and technology and all kinds of things that are intricate for their own sake.
I even have an old-fashioned fascination with trains - love to ride them, treasure a few memories such as standing on a concrete apron about ten feet from a freighter doing around 45-50 and feeling the thunder right in my guts, the history…
…and I’ve always thought model trains were the dullest thing on earth. At least you can fly model airplanes and rockets… but sitting in your basement building an enormously detailed layout that’s so fragile you have to escort visitors to see it, and then… watching it run around and around… it’s a joke, right? Some kind of old-school hipster put-on? Right?
That doesn’t really seem like a good argument in the context of this thread. The question is why women don’t like something, so the women who don’t like the thing are coming into the thread to explain why they don’t like it. I’m not sure what you would expect, lavishing praise? People tend to not like things that they find boring. This is a reasonable response to the question.
It would be like me saying to you, ''Why don’t you like jewelry?"
And you replying, ‘‘Because jewelry is boring.’’
And then me accusing you of denigrating my interests. Anybody who asks a question like that has to know the answer is not going to be a glowing review.
While we’re at it, why don’t boys like My Little Pony stuff? Oh wait, they do now. Now I’m all confused.
I love studying and exploring (where legal) historical rail infrastructure. I live in an area (Northern Virginia) that saw some of the very earliest tactical use of railroads in warfare (not just using trains to transport troops and equipment, but attacking trains, running your train into town and disgorging infantry at the right moment, and tearing up the tracks so your opponent can’t move their train). Lots and lots of neat history right here.
A model train set is fun, but there’s a quick end to the fun.
Well, this girl wanted to play with toy trucks and airplanes, but was told that girls didn’t do that.
I now own a cherry-red pickup and I have a pilot’s license, so obviously that didn’t stick well. It might have been cheaper, though, to let me get it out of my system with toy trucks and planes than to have me grow up and satisfy my itch with the full-size ones.
with people who make scratch built layouts there is lots to do. clubs/groups and families can involve many people of many talents.
Ever ask them why?
So how does all these answers sit with the idea women didn’t contribute as much as men to, say, the Industrial Revolution because … of men (the Patriarchy holding women back)?
How do we get Stephenson’s Rocket if it’s left to women?
Good God no. I would have thought that insanely stupid, and said so. I had very little filter as a kid. I don’t have much of a filter as an adult either, come to that. It didn’t take me long to realize that when they made a version of boy-toys “for girls” it was going to be dumbed down and covered in flowers and probably only come in hot pink, which I hated. If I want glitter all over my model of the Concorde, I’ll glue it there myself.
The HO-scale train set around the tree was a proper model train set, thank you – the two locomotives I recall most clearly were a modern silver Amtrak, and a black and orange one that was probably whatever BNSF was called before it became BNSF in the 1990s. The Amtrak had a matching set of passenger cars, but the other one usually pulled a variety of realistically-painted tankers and freight.
I never had any interest in Thomas the Tank Engine. Those stories are not actually about trains. They are about the interactions of a set of children’s book characters who happen to take the form of anthropomorphized locomotives. At no point did they do anything that I found interesting, like show cutaway diagrams of an engine room, or explain how the air brakes connected between cars.
I’m 33 years old, for the record. The childhood we’re talking about is post feminist revolution, pre social media, smack in the early video game era.
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I wonder if by assuming girls who are into “stereotypical guy interests” are tomboys, we’re actually entrenching stereotypes.
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I am so ridiculously not a tomboy. I work as a model and a performer. I’m going to be doing burlesque and possibly hooping downtown for First Night this year. I have more makeup than one could reasonably shake a stick at.
Ok, Fair enough. Why don’t you start some threads that say "Why don’t males like …? Insert some woman thing.
Or, maybe your afraid of ridicule or being vulnerable?
I mean this is a DISCUSSION board where people pose questions and others reply. It’s fun and educational to discuss different issues and gender is a big one.
Not all men like model trains either. I have one of the most masculine engineering jobs in a factory that you can have and I never thought anything at all about model trains or even real ones. I like riding on recreational trains through scenic areas like the one I took through the mountains of Colorado last summer but that was only a means to an end. Trains are boring to me even on a big scale and 1000x worse even when they are just small models. To me. that is the equivalent of a Barbie doll set for people that should have advanced past that.
OTOH, I have always loved airplanes with a near fetish. I can stare at and talk about even the most derelict small plane all day without even flying it or riding in it and it only gets worse from there as the planes get better. I think I would legally marry the right SuperCub if I could.
For the gender equality thing though, a lot of people are off-base. Most of those behaviors are inborn and not taught. They can be reinforced n a social loop but there is nothing arbitrary about them. I am raising two daughters with exactly the same parents and upbringing. My oldest has always been a kind of eclectic, eccentric girl with mild tomboy tendencies since she could talk but my youngest is a pure girly princess. Nobody taught either of them those roles because you can’t in any significant sense. They were born who they are and I just had to roll with it as a parent.
I never really cared what gender roles they preferred from the day they were born and I always wanted them to play with boy type toys because I was the one keeping them every night and I got bored with all the dolls but my youngest especially would have none of that. I would stack something up to destroy it with a toy car and she would just move right in to pick up the ruins to build a doll house with it.
Your defensiveness is causing you to miss CCL’s point. There is no great mystery why males don’t like soap operas or make-up or shopping. We hear the reasons all the time because men (and a lot of women, including myself) are always talking shit about these things.
But I imagine if someone were to post a question like that, you’d get a lot of responses like the ones you’ve gotten here. “I am a guy and I like X!” “I find X boring and stupid.” “I’m a woman, and you couldn’t make me do X if my life depended on it!” It always boils down to “everyone likes different things” and “people don’t conform to stereotypes exactly.”
Why would I ask a question I already know the answer to? The reason is a mixture of different things appealing to different personalities and socialization, just like damn near every other generalization you can make about human behavior. Asking the question seems like rather a waste of my time and energy, to be honest. Besides, even the things I love best in the world, I’m well aware of their drawbacks and can see how someone else might not find them appealing.
This. You don’t have to buy pre-fab stuff. Building it yourself is the REAL hobby.
You have to be a government, a land planner, a businessman, a landscaper, planner, an earth-builder, researcher, electrician, painter, mathematician, artist, project manager, and a railroad tycoon. All these talents blend together.
We build models that don’t just sit on a shelf. They look realistic, and they MOVE and do things!
But if you don’t get it, that’s OK.
In mild defence of “Thomas” – and as you inform, this is a thing for which you have no use, and there’s no reason whatever that you should be obliged to like it (even as a small kid, the “Thomas” stories never greatly took my fancy): however, the books were written by a genuinely keen and knowledgeable railway enthusiast. By the way, the author was as it happens, a Church of England clergyman – for some reason or none, now and in the past a seemingly disproportionate number of those guys have been railfans.
He was basically writing for small children, the great majority of whom would be too young to “get” advanced technical or mechanical detail re railway operation. Nonetheless: anthropomorphising aside, the railway practices and lore in so far as depicted in the “Thomas” books, are correct for the British railway scene of some three-quarters of a century ago.
According to Model Ralroader magazine, about 5% of the modelers are women. No, I don’t have a cite handy. These days, where the norm is pre-built rolling stock and structures, the women tend to be more into the scratchbuilding end of the hobby.
FWIW, I’d love to build a doll house, but only so far as constructing the structure. Decorating and furnishing would be someone else’s job.