fall inside a hole
Child Guidance Giant Coast to Coast Motorized Railroad (1968)
First written October 30, 2024
The Guild Guidance Giant Coast to Coast Motorized Railway is a Child Guidance Railroad set released for Holiday 1968 at Sears. It features a massive track layout with operating switches and elevation for the included Joy Ride train to traverse.
Set contents
| Quantity |
Item |
Photo |
|---|---|---|
| 7 pieces | Joy Ride train with passengers |
 |
| ~10 | Straight Rail (red) |
 |
| ~4 | Half Track (red) |
 |
| ~29 | Curve Rail (red) |
 |
| ~3 | Geared Switch Track (red) (one left, two right - I think) |
 |
| 4 | Bridge Rail (two of each direction) |
 |
| 1 | Station |
 |
| 1 | Signal Box |
 |
| 1 | Water Tower |
 |
| Guidancetown U.S.A./Constructive Thinking building elements |
 |
|
| Trackside accessories |
 |
|
| Trees |
 |
The train in this set is the Joy Ride train manufactured in Japan by Tomy for Child Guidance. This set included the individual boxed Joy Ride Train.
The train consists of a red and blue motorized locomotive that takes one C battery and three carriages shaped like cars. The locomotive in my copy of this set is an earlier variant that predates the tooling being updated to work better in the Double-O-Eight Runaway Loco sets.
Three figures of children are included that can sit in the cars.
The set includes standard Child Guidance Railroad trackside accessories as well as some trees used only in Sears sets as well as several of the standalone buildings. Components to build a few Guidancetown U.S.A. buildings are included. I'm not sure exactly which components came in this set - my example was missing a bunch of the pieces needed to build the large building on the cover, and I didn't end up building a copy of the smaller building shown...
My copy of the set was incomplete and did not have an instruction sheet for the track layout, but the box says you should be able to recreate what is on the cover so I grabbed additional track from my existing collection to try and copy the layout on the box as best I could... I'm not 100% sure about some parts of the back or the area that goes under the Guidancetown structure.
All set up and accessorized this really is an impressive set... I had this set about a year before getting it set up to take photos - I thought the extra parts I needed were in storage but I actually had already taken them out (actually, I had never put them back) and then I didn't have enough space anyways and when I finally got it all set up the only Joy Ride train I had out of storage (the original one from this set, in fact) didn't want to run properly.
Eventually, perhaps if I can get an even more solid idea of what exactly was included, I will set it all up again and get the train running properly.