WE made a favourite Friday trip of ours to Helmsley market last week. Up at Meeting House Court is a toy shop you can’t miss. It has two windows and whenever you go there is a model prairie freight train doing a figure of eight journey from one window to the next and back again, and back again, for as long as you want to watch it.

Little boys never fully grow up and over the years I have accumulated a lot of time watching this tireless little engine pull trucks and wagons around for my own amusement and that of our younger generations.

Last Friday, I popped my head around the door and said to the owner that the train must have travelled a lot of miles in its time.

With that, we got into conversation. His name is Andrew Foster and he said another customer, who was a statistician, had said the same thing earlier in the week.

When told it had been running seven days a week for 16 years, the customer worked out on a piece of paper that it had done 17,498,882 laps of the track.

If the track was measured, someone could convert that into miles and it would be interesting to know how far.

George Appleby, Clifton, York.