TrainDad

This is part 2 of a series.

I’ve reviewed the var­i­ous Thomas sets else­where, so I’ll not repeat that now. Each type has good and bad char­ac­ter­is­tics, but I’ve never been com­pletely sat­is­fied with any of them. Since model rail­roads aren’t good options for young chil­dren, I’ll drop them from the dis­cus­sion and address the oth­ers. Here are some rea­sons for my dis­sat­is­fac­tion, in a vague order of importance:

• Ease of use.
  • For young chil­dren — my two-year-old being a good exam­ple — the way track hooks together and cars cou­ple up is crit­i­cal. In my expe­ri­ence, the Take Along track is vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for these young ones; the Tomy track is very dif­fi­cult. Mag­netic cou­plers often repel each other, if you don’t get them right; the plas­tic Tomy hook con­nec­tors are ridicu­lous. No pos­si­ble way most kids could work them.
  • Fea­tures not well-engineered and tested. The pop­u­lar Take Along Round­house, for exam­ple, has bay doors that I can hardly open. The turntable can slide at an awk­ward angle and get stuck or just refuse to “snap” into the cor­rect position.
• Qual­ity of build.
  • No argu­ment on the wood sets, but the oth­ers are ques­tion­able. No: Tomy is frankly awful, made of cheap, thin, flimsy plas­tic. They look, feel, and act cheap. Take Along has well-build engines and cars, but the track is def­i­nitely second-rate, and the struc­tures aren’t quite as well-engineered as they should be.
• Func­tion­al­ity.
  • Mag­netic cou­pling isn’t strong enough to make long con­sists (lines of cars hooked together).
  • Take Along uses two totally dif­fer­ent types of track with dif­fer­ent con­nec­tors. That has become a con­fus­ing mess of adapters and strange track.
  • The wood set works best on a hard sur­face; that’s why they are often used with a ridiculously-expensive train table. The Tomy sets are quite dif­fi­cult to use on carpet.
• Price.
  • All sets are rel­a­tively expen­sive. Com­pare a Take Along cast engine to a com­pa­ra­ble Match­box™ vehi­cle, and the price is typ­i­cally 5–8 times higher. The wood sets are priced extremely high.
• Inter­est over time.
  • I’m sure there are excep­tions, but my expe­ri­ence shows that most kids start los­ing inter­est in these sets rel­a­tively quickly. For the most part, they do one thing only; i.e., they aren’t designed to grow with the child and pro­vide intel­lec­tual chal­lenges and extended play­time enjoy­ment over a wide range of ages.
• Real­ism.
  • None of the three are real­is­tic in some crit­i­cal ways. In fact, none of them even use rails — they all have wheels that ride in ruts. The Tomy sets min­i­mize car derail­ments by let­ting the wheels flop, which looks like they are broken.
  • Thomas is mod­eled on the British rail­road sys­tem. My lit­tle guy, with his only expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­can rail­road­ing, wanted toys of the big trains he was see­ing in real life. I know that’s not a fair argu­ment for other peo­ple, but it’s big deal to this one.
• Not fol­low­ing the crowd.
  • Have you seen the Thomas aisle at Wal-Mart?! You mean to tell me there is no other kid’s train out there?

Now, on to part 3…

If your child is inter­ested in trains, it’s inevitable that they will end up dis­cov­er­ing Thomas the Tank Engine. Aside from the books, videos, pil­lows, tooth­brushes and band-aids, Thomas is widely avail­able in a vari­ety of toy trains. A wide vari­ety — it’s con­fus­ing! Here are the five major types of Thomas rail­roads, and some of the good and bad with each:

1. Learn­ing Curve’s Take Along Thomas and Friends is where many peo­ple start. These are small cast metal and plas­tic vehi­cles, sim­i­lar in size to Match­box™ or Hot Wheels™. Noth­ing is pow­ered. Cou­pling is mag­netic. Because indi­vid­ual engines are avail­able en masse at nearly all major retail­ers, many kids own at least one or two of them. Once you start adding track, things get messy. The ini­tial style of track didn’t work very well, with tiny con­nec­tors that were hard for young chil­dren. That style is grad­u­ally being replaced by a big­ger, eas­ier style (shown right). Unfor­tu­nately, right now both prod­ucts are on the mar­ket, along with a mess of adapters to allow inter­con­nec­tion. Try to just pur­chase the new style if pos­si­ble. As the name sug­gests, this is the series to get if you are tight on space. When it comes to sets, most pop­u­lar is the Round­house Play­set. This is a fun and tightly-packed set that is easy to travel with. Note that the new style of track packs nicely into the lid, but the old style doesn’t — make sure you buy one with the new track! Many more parts and sets are avail­able than you will see in stores. Some of the best are the Take Along Play Mat, Harold’s Heli­port, and the fan­tas­tic, just-announced Thomas and Percy Car­ni­val.
2. Tomy, or Tom­ica, makes an all-plastic pow­ered line that is very pop­u­lar. The Water Tower Steam Set is a good start­ing place. There are huge sets avail­able, and they can often be found for great prices around the hol­i­days. Note that these take up lots of space — one set is often larger than 4’x8’. There are some great acces­sory sets, such as Harold at the Heli­pad and the Sodor Quarry. If money is tight, this is one of the best options. I’ve heard that Tomy has recently released die cast engines, but I have yet to see them.
3. The wooden sets made by Learn­ing Curve, such as the Round­house Set, are the best Thomas toys avail­able. They are inter­change­able with Brio and many other brands of wooden track and cars. They are expen­sive but durable. They have both pow­ered and unpow­ered ver­sions. Cou­pling is mag­netic, and there is an immense selec­tion of cars and engines avail­able. Since the wooden set works best on a hard sur­face, many peo­ple use them with a train table. The brand-name train tables are crazily expen­sive, though. In fact, you could take out a sec­ond mort­gage to pay for some of the high-end sets like the $700 Learn­ing Curve Thomas & Friends Wooden Rail­way — Sights & Sounds Set (on sale now for the low, low price of $540!). If you are seri­ous about enter­ing the wooden world, you can get a sim­i­larly fab­u­lous set for a frac­tion of the price. Get the Kid­Kraft Train Table and 120-pc. Trans­porta­tion City, then add Thomas, Annie and Clara­bel, and a Friends Gift Pack. One more thing — the cheap­est way to get more engines might be to take advan­tage of the free toy included with many Thomas DVDs.
4. The Bach­mann Thomas set hardly counts as a toy. This HO scale model rail­road set is lovely but too frag­ile for young chil­dren. It adds delight­ful mov­ing eyes to the engines and the most detail and pre­ci­sion of all. They have an appear­ance nearly iden­ti­cal to the trains in the Thomas tele­vi­sion series. There are some acces­sory pieces avail­able, though noth­ing like the selec­tions of the pre­vi­ous types, and sev­eral addi­tional engines and cars. If you decide to go this route, you need to know that Bach­mann makes two types of track; one has a gray base, one a black base. The Thomas set only works with the black base track.
5. The Lionel Thomas set is clas­sic Lionel O gauge. It’s more of a toy than the Bach­mann set, but is quite expen­sive. Few acces­sories are avail­able beyond engines and cars; in fact, I’ve only seen a sin­gle lit­tle track­side shed. It is the largest Thomas set by far — Thomas him­self is about 8″ long — and is quite impres­sive. I think this is pri­mar­ily aimed at grandparents.

I said five major types, because there are many other types and sizes of Thomas toys. Since Thomas is all about licens­ing, they will let just about any­body make another prod­uct. Ertl pro­duced cast metal Thomas trains for a decade. Although they have been dis­con­tin­ued, they are still read­ily avail­able on the web. If you run across them and are tempted, that’s fine — just remem­ber that they are not com­pat­i­ble with any of the other sys­tems. Lego Duplo has also pro­duced Lego Thomas prod­ucts. Tomix has pro­duced a few N-scale model rail­road items, and Hornby pro­duces an OO-gauge line of Thomas trains, pri­mar­ily sold in Eng­land. A line called My First Thomas, specif­i­cally designed for infants, was sold for a brief time in the US and is still avail­able in Eng­land. Even then I’m sure I’ve missed a few.

It’s hard to imag­ine how the par­ent of a train buff could escape Thomas. He dom­i­nates the children’s rail­road­ing indus­try (amaz­ing, to think that such a thing exists!). We first received a “Tomy” engine, then a “TakeA­long” set, then more “Tomy.” After build­ing small col­lec­tions of those two Thomas sets, we found out about the wooden Thomas. Oh no — should we switch? I’m sure our con­fu­sion has been mir­rored a mil­lion times — what’s the best?

But then I found Geo­T­rax. I’m not want­ing to knock Thomas here; Jonathan still likes to play with them. But Geo­T­rax is so far supe­rior that I have to share it with you.

On to part 2…

It seemed so inno­cent when it started. We saw a train on acci­dent, and my son fell in love; so we started look­ing for trains “on pur­pose.” Now we are hunt­ing them down when­ever we can find them. The most frus­trat­ing thing for all of us is a chase that ends with… nothing.

If you find your­self con­stantly “chas­ing trains” but not find­ing them, try lis­ten­ing to their radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions to find out where they are and where they are going. You do this with a “scan­ner” radio receiver—a hand-held radio that rapidly searches all of the rail­road radio chan­nels, and lets you hear any­one talk­ing on them.

It’s easy, inex­pen­sive, and (depend­ing on your cir­cum­stances) might dra­mat­i­cally increase your suc­cess rate. With this new series, I’ll give you all the details.

On to part 2…