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Think bottled water is cleaner and better? Think again.

The Environmental Law Foundation has sued eight bottlers for using words such as “pure” to market water that contains bacteria, arsenic and chlorine. Bottled water is no bargain either: It costs 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water…. Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere…

From Feb. 18, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle

My son, age 3, is obsessed with trains. Crazy obsessed. Throwing fuel on the fire, today we took him to a model train expo.

While the G-scale garden railroad layout was the clear winner — the trains ran at his eye level and were enormous — a small display by a local model club off to the side caught my eye (and his attention, briefly). The display was a small fold-out switching layout. No scenery. Only track attached to a nicely finished wooden surface. The entire thing was less than 5 feet long and rested comfortably and inconspicuously on an ordinary conference table. Not surprising that we hadn’t noticed it at first.

A single toggle switch controlled the direction of the single locomotive. No speed adjustments were possible. It could be stopped, moving right, or moving left. Each siding was only large enough to hold 1-3 freight cars. The switches were all manually operated.

The setup was clever in that it was incredibly simple to operate yet challenging as a logical puzzle. The game: to reposition, oops, “spot” all the freight cars as quickly as possible to their arbitrarily assigned positions on the sidings in the least amount of time. According to the guy sitting behind the table and puttering with the wheels, uh, “trucks” of a recalcitrant caboose, the layout is a classic named “John Allen’s Time Saver.”

Flash forward 2 hours. Back at home, wife and son nap as Dad googles “John Allen Time Saver” to learn more. (See the best results here and here.) Apparently, the Timesaver is one of two great switching, er, “shunting” puzzles well-known to model railroaders. (The other is Inglenook Sidings.)

Ingenious! What a great father-son project idea! Build motor skills during construction and operation; exercise logic and planning; and play with model trains all at once.

Actually, now that I think about it, so does the Brio setup that he already has…but that’s not nearly as much fun for Dad.

Addendum: Breaking News! Timesaver has been expressed in the Brio vernacular.

Today’s New York Times editorial: Bullseye!