Lots of people here admit shamefacedly to clearing up childhood misconceptions only in their teens or even twenties. Is late sixties a record?
When I was little we used to go for holidays at Brighton. A special train called the Brighton Bell took us there. My memory from age 2 was reinforced for several years by the picture of it in my trains picture book. The name Brighton Bell made perfect sense to me because it was, unusually for that date, an electric train. A steam train on that route would no doubt have been called the Brighton Whistle. I had no occasion to think about it after the age of maybe six, but about thirty years later a magazine article about the history of sea-bathing jogged my mind and I thought "Er, maybe that should be the 'Brighton Belle' ?" But by then I was hardly sure this was a real memory it would have been trouble to find out. So I waited another thirty years for internet and Google to be invented and sure enough the other day found out there was this famous and in its day avant-garde train called the Brighton Belle; images on the net fit with such very pale memory as remains to me.
So that misconception is cleared up now, shows I do get there in the end. I get there slowly but oh yes I get there I get there.
A childhood belief about trains

others believed things like this
- i used to believe that if you put a penny on a train tracks that it would derail it — ROSS
- For some reason, I used to believe that women only got raped on train tracks.
— Jessica Tinch - I used to believe that peanuts were a daily must to strengthen the memory like elephants — Qb Cheese
- I used to believe that tv people were tiny famous people that lived inside that box with a window called TV.— Miguel Horacio
- When I was little i thought lb for pounds was pronounced lubs, and i called them that for 2 years. Anon
- I used to believe that Alexander Graham Bell was not just one person. I thought that they were three people!— J.D.