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…