She's a rusty old barge!

In the last review, I posited that Bell Station's main point was to make a basic train set that highlights the Easy Connect system. I think that in turn, this set's main point is to apply Easy Connect's features to iconic Sodor locations. Not only that, but this set's footprint is much larger than Bell Station, and features a lot more in the way of playability.

The star of the show is the titular Tidmouth Sheds, which in typical modern Tidmouth Sheds toy fashion, only has three berths to hold engines. Unlike other recent toys, the turntable connected to it does seem like it might be long enough to accommodate the deluxe engines like Gordon, James, and Henry, so it fares a bit better in that respect. It also includes an outside garage with space to put a road vehicle and a helipad for the included Harold, as well as an vehicle lift inside to role-play some repair work. Some plastic Workman meeple can swivel around to roleplay other aspects of engine care, and each berth ends in a lifting section of track that can dunk the engine onto the turntable when it's lined up. On paper this is a pretty darn good Tidmouth Sheds toy that any kid should be happy with, but there is one issue I have with my copy...

This set and Bell Station are both packed with all the track and scenery pieces loose in the box, with the exception of the vehicles being kept in their own plastic viewing section, and some smaller parts that are kept in a paper pouch. This worked out fine for Bell Station, but a lot of major pieces on this set have come out of the box warped from the pressure of just, sitting in a box loose with nothing preventing them from being bent out of shape. In my case, either the turntable piece or the shed track piece is warped, and so the turntable won't sit flat on the ground. This is incredibly annoying, and I'm sure this will frustrate the Thomas target demographic of autistic pre-schoolers as well.

-Unfortunately this same frustration carries over to the windmill, which is a shame because on paper this is a perfect destination for a capstone playset like this! The windmill itself is well-sculpted with cute and vibrant sticker detailing, and pushing down the pressure plate causes the windmill to spin! There's even parking spaces for toy cars like with Bell Station! Sadly, one of the windmill's blades is bent inwards with visible stress marks. Every time I activate my copy's spinning gimmick, the bent blade bumps against the tower of the windmill, and if it stops spinning with the bent blade at the bottom, the spinning feature gets stuck and requires moving the blades by hand to unstick the blade from the tower. It's a huge shame, and I hope not every copy will have issues with this because this is an amazingly-designed toy! It's just a shame that the genius of it's been sabotaged by poor packaging design.

The two other accessories are a drawbridge with some road for cars to drive on once the bridge is lifted, and a level crossing where a car can pass over the tracks. As mentioned in the Bell Station review, there aren't any road vehicles available in the toyline yet, so your options are either to bust out some diecast cars or roll the included Thomas down these road sections like he's some kinda lunatic.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, this set comes with plastic versions of Thomas and Harold! Thomas is identical to the Thomas that came with Bell Station (albeit with my copy from this set having *much* worse printing quality), so I'm still going to wait to get the metal version in-hand before publishing any thoughts. Same goes for Harold, though I feel like I should give him a *little* bit of lip service since he's new to me.

Counting or not counting weird redesigns, he's an okay toy. He'd be way better with the metal body, which could be said of any of these plastic clones of the metal engines, but it *really* needs to be said that this plastic Harold feels cheap and light in a way the plastic Thomases don't. He doesn't have any metal weights like the Thomases do, so he feels way worse than them. It's not great, so I'm hoping the metal version feels better.

Overall, I really want to say that this set is good, but the way the packaging lends itself to warping parts of the set is very concerning to me. Objectively, if you were buying a train set for your kid, this is probably the one you should go for since it has more going on than Bell Station and features two essential Thomas locations, but the quality control issue hangs over this set like the sword of Damocles to the point that I'd honestly recommend Bell Station over it. That said, hopefully others who buy this set will have a better experience with it.

Bell Station Train Set is a cute little thing that feels very 'generic train set' to my mind, if only because "Bell Station" isn't a historical Sodor location. I think that works in this set's favor though, because it sets a very good first impression for the Easy Connect system as a whole. The star of the show isn't an Iconic Location, it's The System Itself!

The Easy Connect track itself is great, a huge step up from the TM2 track. It feels like it's made of a similar material (I'm not sure what it is specifically, I want to say maybe Nylon or PVC?) but is far easier to put together. The cleverest thing about it is how they engineered the rails to snap together, so it retains one of the few good qualities the TM2 track had by making it possible to scoot your track around or even pick it up while remaining an intact layout. The re-railing function in the rails is a very smart design as well, but I haven't really interacted with it terribly much. I suspect it's mostly there for the Littlest Children who don't know how rails work yet, so it's nice that they've been thrown a bone.

My only issues with Easy Connect are the continued insistence on inconsistent track colors throughout a set (I miss the uniformity of Plarail blue or TM1 brown) and the use of 60° curved track instead of superior 45° curves. Neither of these points are indictments of the Easy Connect system, since they aren't fundamental aspects of the system where removing them would break the whole thing, but I do wish these were different.

Bell Station itself is an adorable building. It has nice color breakup and some very fun and expressive stickers, and the play feature where pushing the pressure plate rings the station's bell is cute. I'm certain kids are going to adore playing with that.

One thing about the station that piqued my curiosity was the fact it has a bunch of parking spaces on the sides of the station building. It struck me as odd at first, since there are only two road vehicles confirmed for the toyline this year (Flynn in Wave 2 of the Basics, Bertie in Wave 3 of the Deluxes), but then I realized... This new toyline was developed by ex-Cars diecast line designers. They may be assuming kids in the Thomas age demo may already have at least a couple of Cars or Hot Wheels vehicles. This is what the parking spaces are for, at least at this stage when there aren't many road vehicles, right?

So I gave it a shot and, yeah, these sorts of vehicles fit like a glove. If this was the actual designer intent, I've gotta hand it to them. This combined with how they've finally fulfilled the Motorized-compatible Diecast line's destiny of becoming Wooden Railway But Cheaper (i will explain this some other day) definitely gives me confidence in this toyline's direction, even if the new promo art style and some of the character redesign choices are a bit questionable.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, this set also comes with a plastic dummy version of Thomas!

...I don't know if I actually want to give my full thoughts on this Thomas yet, that'd probably be best saved for when I actually get my hands on the proper Diecast version of him. For now, all I'll say is that I like this design a lot more in person than I did in renders, especially regarding the face. He's got a bit of a Stepney vibe to him, y'know? Like the rest of the set, he's made a good first impression now that I have him in-person.

I will say it is a bit silly that they're putting plastic dummy versions of the vehicles in these non-motorized playsets, but I can understand why it happened. The actual metal engines are made in Thailand whereas everything else is in Vietnam, so making plastic clones of the engines probably makes more sense logistically than importing a bunch of stock from Thailand just to stuff into sets. Keeps the process streamlined, I assume.