Sure, we had one. My siblings and I got it when I was maybe eight. We had just enough tracks to make an oval with a siding, or a figure eight. We had a New York Central engine and a coal car, a boxcar loaded with finest quality Lehigh portland cement, a tanker carrying hydrocarbon rocket fuel (how cool is that?) and, of course, a red, red caboose.
Being the family nerd and control freak, I was the one who mainly played with it. From plastic model kits I made farm buildings, mills, depots, factories, stations. I didn’t go in much for houses. I couldn’t construct a landscape—I assembled the tracks and dispersed the buildings on the pinewood floor of an upstairs hall and always had to put everything back in boxes when I was done, because of foot traffic. I never made up stories about the workers or the train passengers, I just arranged the buildings in different configurations, then drove my Matchbox cars down the notional streets. (Later, I turned into a novelist attentive to structure and weak on plot.)