TrainDad

I sup­pose it’s pretty nor­mal to make a train out of card­board boxes, but this time Jonathan and I got a lit­tle bit car­ried away. We’ve been col­lect­ing big dia­per boxes for about as long as he’s been alive; they are a handy size, very sturdy, and have nice “han­dles” cut in the sides. We decided they would make a great train.

We found some pho­tos of a steam engine (the orig­i­nal Polar Express, Pere Mar­quette No. 1225) and printed them out, then adhered them to the sides of the box. At Jonathan’s request (read: demand!), we added a smoke­stack and the very impor­tant cow catcher. Just the right size hole cut in the top allows him to climb in and be the engineer.

A few more prints turned another box into a ten­der, then more for a hop­per car and a tank car, and we had a nice lit­tle freight unit going. I have to admit to a spe­cial advan­tage: the abil­ity to print onto adhesive-backed vinyl, in essence mak­ing giant stickers.

Unwrapped dia­per boxes make up the rest of the train now, along with a wire rack and a hand-held sweeper. (Any­thing makes a train, when cou­pled to some­thing else!) One morn­ing I went down­stairs to find that he had loaded each box up with stuffed ani­mal pas­sen­gers. He’s had a great time play­ing with it. Ah, these are the days!

More news is com­ing out about the new HIT Enter­tain­ment Track­mas­ter Thomas & Friends Rail­way sys­tem. HIT has estab­lished ThomasTrackmaster.com as the online home for the prod­uct line. Amazon.com is now car­ry­ing a long list of new Track­mas­ter prod­ucts includ­ing sev­eral large sets and a track expan­sion pack. HIT has now re-released vir­tu­ally every TOMY engine and car made. They have also released a remote-control Thomas, with a con­troller that looks like an exact clone of a Geo­T­rax remote. The prod­ucts are being sold at Wal­mart, K-Mart, Tar­get, Toys-r-Us and Kay­bee Toys, as well as through the nor­mal online retailers.

HIT enter­tain­ment is spec­tac­u­larly good at mar­ket­ing (read: sell­ing), so I expect the Track­mas­ter line to get far more expo­sure than TOMY did. The cur­rent sets are using the same low-quality acces­sories (bridges, etc.), but I wouldn’t be sur­prised if they didn’t upgrade and improve over time.

Visit your friendly neigh­bor­hood Wal­Mart and you’ll likely find that the stan­dard Tomy Thomas Road and Rail items are rapidly being replaced by some­thing new: the Thomas & Friends Track­Mas­ter Rail­way Sys­tem. At first glance, you prob­a­bly wouldn’t even notice: the pack­ag­ing is iden­ti­cal to Tomy except for a red band on the left side. Since it’s a Thomas prod­uct, they have to make it as con­fus­ing as pos­si­ble: the pack­ag­ing is so sim­i­lar that most peo­ple would buy this think­ing it is Tomy. And the prod­uct inside looks sus­pi­ciously like Tomy. But it’s not: it’s from HiT, the giant licens­ing com­pany. At least, that’s what the pack­ag­ing says. And it also clearly says that it is not com­pat­i­ble with any other Thomas prod­ucts. Upon closer exam­i­na­tion, how­ever, the bot­tom of the engine is boldly stamped with the Tomy name. And a lit­tle test­ing showed that the engine is, in fact, com­pletely com­pat­i­ble with the old Tomy sets. So what’s dif­fer­ent? The track.

The track is dra­mat­i­cally improved. It is a sin­gle thick, molded plas­tic form very rem­i­nis­cent of the “fat track” that comes with some Take Along sets. Sure enough, not only does the new engine run on the old track, but the old engines run on the new track as well. The whole thing is just a com­pli­cated dis­guise for a track replacement.

My assump­tion is that HiT bought out the licens­ing rights, but then turned around and had Tomy do the man­u­fac­tur­ing anyway.

One note of inter­est… the new track has a new con­nec­tor sys­tem, one that is extremely sim­i­lar to the Take Along fat track con­nec­tors. There’s a prob­lem with this: I think it infringes on the track patent held by Fisher-Price for Geo­T­rax. If you look at the back of any Geo­T­rax track, you’ll find a patent num­ber. Research it, and you will see that it cov­ers a few basic tech­niques for con­nect­ing track. The first one of those seems to describe the Track­Mas­ter sys­tem exactly. Maybe noth­ing will come of it, but I think FP could have a case if they wanted it.

I didn’t expect this story to be full of dra­matic twists and turns!

I dis­cov­ered I was wrong in my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Percy body. I thought it was from the pull-back series, but a strange swivel­ing ten­der on the back made me real­ize that it was some­thing dif­fer­ent. After a lit­tle research, I dis­cov­ered that it is from a set called the Thomas Mail Deliv­ery set. Out of curios­ity, I also picked up a Percy pull-back to com­pare. They are very sim­i­lar in size. I was sur­prised to see that they vary in details — rel­a­tively impor­tant details, such as the num­ber of steam domes.

In any case, with my two Per­cies and “Blackie” in hand, I started dis­as­sem­bly. (“Blackie” has become our nick­name for that early Geo­T­rax steam engine, taken at the rec­om­men­da­tion of some­one on the Yahoo group recently). I got so far as to real­ize that both Per­cies are about 1/8-inch (say, 3 mm.) too nar­row to fit eas­ily. Con­sid­er­ing the options, I was lean­ing toward an evil jux­ta­po­si­tion: chop the front end and the cab off Percy; add the front end to Blackie, and replace Blackie’s cab. A few touch-ups to the “kick plate” around the sides, and the buffers front and back, a lit­tle paint.…

Just then Jonathan entered the room and caught sight of what was going on. Oh my, the excite­ment that can be gen­er­ated in such a tiny fel­low! He gave total focus to Blackie –he really wasn’t too inter­ested in the Per­cies at all — and just went gen­er­ally crazy over him. He “helped” me reassem­ble and then add bat­ter­ies. I pulled out that bright blue remote, and he was so excited he couldn’t speak: “Oh! Oh! OH!”

Well, Blackie is now a per­ma­nent part of his motive team, and I’ll have to wait on my franken­stein­ian  project. For now.…

I hap­pened across two items yes­ter­day at Good­will: a Geo­T­rax steam engine, com­plete with remote con­trol, and the top shell of a pull-back Percy from one of the innu­mer­able Thomas the Tank Engine lines. The Percy is the exact size and shape to fit on the Geo­T­rax engine, so here we go. It’s been done before: you can see step-by-step pho­tos in the Yahoo Geo­T­rax group pho­tos. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Go to the bat­tery aisle of your local Wal-Mart, and you will find that a four-pack of any brand recharge­able bat­ter­ies will set you back about ten bucks. But Wal-Mart has a secret — half-price bat­ter­ies hid­ing out with the dig­i­tal cam­era acces­sories. Four AA or AAA recharge­ables (NiMH) are only $4.95. Amaz­ingly, this approx­i­mates the low­est price for bulk gener­ics on eBay (after ship­ping). They are also avail­able with fast 30-minute and 1-hour chargers.

These aren’t wimpy bat­ter­ies, either, with a 1,000 mah rat­ing for AAA (the higher energy capac­ity means longer run time).

Just look for the gaudy metal­lic blue/green bat­ter­ies in the yel­low “bub­ble” pack­age. A neces­sity for any­one using dig­i­tal cam­eras or battery-eating toys!