She's a rusty old barge!

Toby's had a rough go of it in terms of compatible-with-contemporary-motorized-trains diecast toys. Trackmaster Push Along Toby was one of the more embarrassing products that came out of that toyline, what with its holes cut out in the sideplates for the little wheel nubs, and its hilarously stretched side profile. I kinda wish I'd picked one up back in the day for the meme and for comparison here, but alas, I do not own him. Metal Collection Toby from All Engines Go! was a marked improvement, and was basically a perfectly designed toy... aside from the fact it was *way* huger than any of the other engines in the line. The big issue here was that the wheelbase of the engines in that toyline is wider than everything from the running board up, so in giving Toby his truly square shape, he had to become enormous by necessity. However, the Easy Connect diecasts are roughly 4mm narrower in their wheelbase, which provides much more leeway in terms of making a properly-scaled Toby. So it sounds like the design team had an easy job ahead of them, right? Just take the design principles from Metal Collection Toby and apply them to a more appropriately-scaled toy based on his CGI animation model. What could possibly go wrong?

Uh, a lot, apparently. Toby here is easily the worst vehicle out of this initial wave of Easy Connect diecasts, possibly the worst out of the first year? We've not seen anything from Wave 3 yet, and Salty could give him a run for his money, but it's almost amazing how basically every facet this Toby is wrong. In fact, I'm going to write up an itemized list, discuss piece by piece why each component of this toy creates a perfect storm of bad design decisions.

ITEM #1) THE RUNNING BOARD

Obviously this is what the eyes are drawn to first, the fact that there's a gaping hole in this toy's sides. A key component of Toby the Tram Engine's design is just, gone! Not there. I have to assume this happened because when you look at the underside of Toby, you can see that when the wheels extended out to the maximum on their axles, the outer part of the wheel extends past where the sculpt ends for the running board for a few millimeters. So, okay, clearly they were just working around restrictions here. They wanted Toby's wheels to have a full range of motion for going around curves and such, and they didn't want to compromise the look of the toy by either scaling up Toby as a whole or widening his lower half and giving him the appearance of child-bearing hips. A simple enough explanation, but this does beg the question...

ITEM #2) THE WHEELS

Why did they feel the need to use the standard wheels on this release? This may seem like a weird question, because like, of course they'd use the normal train wheels. The thing is though, the standard wheels for Easy Connect are kinda needlessly thick? Like, they're nice and sturdy, but I don't think there's any kind of structural reason they *have* to stretch out this far. Looking once again at wooden toys of Toby, you can see that they accomplish their look by having dedicated flatter wheels that can better fit within the confines of the sideplates. All it would take is making a wheel that's *just* the part that touches the ground, omitting the raised lip section or the central nub surrounding the axle, and you have a wheelset that could easily fit within a set of nice, compact sideplates.

I have to assume the reason *this* solution wasn't gone for was because they didn't want to make special wheels just for Toby, but I would like to point out that not only would these wheels also be useful for other characters whose wheels are covered by sideplates, such as the Mavis that's coming out in Wave 2, or potential future toys of Flora or Timothy.

ITEM #3) THE METAL CHASSIS

Unfortunately, the issues with Toby don't just end at the sideplates, because he does this baffling thing where his main body is made of plastic, and the metal part of the engine is the chassis. This is just... why? There's no obvious reason for them to have done this, especially because the Metal Collection Toby had a metal body and it was perfectly fine! It has the knock-on effect of making Toby have the worst hand-feel out of the Wave 1 basics by far, and the fact that it's metal painted black *also* creates a much more noticeable color clash between it and the charcoal-colored wheels.

ITEM #4) THE PLASTIC BODY

There's issues with the body too, aside from the fact it's made of plastic, and most of them are to do with the sculpt. Toby's front and side windows are hollow, and so they show the gray plastic from the roof through the holes. This similar to how Metal Collection Toby was designed, but there are two big differences here which make this execution worse. The big thing is that unlike Metal Collection Toby, the entrances into Toby's cab are *not* hollow, and so they just have some black paint applications there to represent the interior instead. Not only does this clash with the gray you can see through the windows, but there's also an issue created by the fact the designers picked out Toby's door handrails in such a way where the black has to work around them, and it just looks so, so bad. Again, this is something Metal Collection Toby did better, because its handrails are much simpler and therefore can just be essentially a straight line inside the cab doors with no issues.

ITEM #5) THE ROOF

Finally, we come to the roof of the toy. The absolute cherry on top of the cake... it's backwards. It's backwards. It's backwards! How did this happen? Surely somebody internally would've caught that this conflicts with the CGI model references, right? Did they just not notice? Did they not care? Was this an *intentional design decision*? It's just baffling. What's worse about it is that it's not even an easy fix, because not only is this toy held together by plastic rivets instead of screws, but the roof is held into the body with one-time clip connections that you need to really fight to free the roof from. This issue wouldn't be forgivable if it was as simple as taking apart the toy and flipping the roof around, but I'd definitely not be complaining about it nearly this much if it were that easy...

The roof itself is also a downgrade on its own merits, since it does away with the separate plastic pieces for the funnel and bell, as with other updates from AEG-onward Metal Collection to Easy Connect. The bell's not a huge loss since it was sort of huge and ridiculous, so it would've sufficed as relief detail sculpted into the roof along the pull cord, maybe picked out with a gold paint app if there was budget for it. There isn't any bell detailing on the roof period, though, which is odd because it really seems like it *should* be present in the middle of the pull cord. The real loss here is the black for the funnel, which on the Metal Collection Toby was the same piece of plastic as the black used to block out the interior of the body. So again, this is just another reason the engineering of this toy should've been more closely derived from the Metal Collection outing, because that design. choice would have fixed both the interior color clashes *and* added that bit of color interest to the roof.

ITEM #6) THE DECO

Speaking of color interest, the overall color scheme of this toy leaves something to be desired. I will say, I do like the sort of nougat-y color used for the wooden body, and the darker brown paint apps on the bracing also look nice. Unfortunately, these paint apps don't grace the front or back ends of Toby, which I find disappointing. Granted, these sorts of paint apps being absent from the fronts of vehicles seems to be a standard thing with Easy Connect metal engines, but with Toby specifically it leaves something to be desired. There's also no white paint apps on Toby's front and rear lamps, and with the strange way they've been sculpted, every part of them save for the strangely-extruded lamp lenses gets lost in the sculpt. I don't understand why those lenses are like this, at a glance they look more like nipples than lamps.

I'm not a huge fan of the dark gray used for the roof, although it's a deco choice I'm willing to accept if this is the color that'll be used in the upcoming Thomas animated series. It is somewhat reminiscent of the black roof he's supposed to have in the Railway Series storybooks, but if the goal here is to brighten up Toby's colors for the sake of marketability, then I feel like the white/light gray of his original TV series look would've been a more fitting choice. What I'm *not* willing to accept is the red on the running board. Given the key art of Toby on the toy packaging has gray sideplates, I have to assume this is not indicative of the new media, but rather another attempt to liven up his colors. Unfortunately, it looks really really bad, since taking the color that's only present on his bufferbeam and extending it to his entire running board just doesn't play well with the other colors involved. Toby would've looked a lot better if this part was made gray! But if this part must be a color other than gray, and we're harkening back to Toby's Railway Series colorway with the darkening of the roof, then I gotta ask... why not make this part blue instead?

I understand there's no blue on the sideplates in the packaging art, but honestly, this is a question I want to extend to the packaging art as well. If Toby's colors need to be livened up, and the people involved with this product refresh are big fans of old-times Thomas, then surely it'd make sense to reintroduce the blue to Toby's sideplates to give him that splash of extra color he's been dying for, right? Especially considering the colors and details of mainstay characters are being retouched in this generation (darkening Gordon and Henry's colors, editing out printed names and such), I feel like this would've been a perfect opportunity to bring this aspect out of the storybooks and into new media. The way I see it, if adding the blue to Toby's sideplates is a bridge too far in terms of editing decos, then I don't know why his typical TV series-derived color palette of gray and brown is being touched up to begin with, because *clearly* using the most boring and unmarketable colors is too integral to his visual identity to make any kind of objectively good update by those standards!

That's the end of the list.

I don't like being so negative about these toys, because like, I'm not part of the target demographic for them! As much as the advertising copy says these toys are calling back to the classic-style trains, at the end of the day, these are for pre-school kids. I think if the designers spent all their time catering solely to the whims of us 20-to-40-year-old hobbyists, the brand would become stagnant. It'd be a different kind of stagnant compared to the stagnancy the brand was in before; perpetually losing sales due to mismanagement of the toylines and lack of character variety, but it'd still eventually become stagnant as it nostalgically chases its own tail and loses sight of the children its meant to be entertaining.

I truly believe Easy Connect is on the right track to become one of the greatest Thomas toylines of all time, expressly because it's tackling head-on the issues that were killing the brand during the entirety of its life under Mattel, and tearing these toys down because they're not *exactly* what *we* want is reductive. But with toys like this new Toby, I do feel like it's important to precisely point out what does and does not work, because the target demographic for these toys cares just as much as we do about the characters being 'right'. Thomas is a brand that's like catnip for autistic, poindexter-y kids, the kind of kids most of us who stuck with the brand into adult hood used to be. When I was that age, there were plenty of Thomas toys I would moan about because they didn't look right! I'd constantly complain about my Take-Along James having gray wheels instead of black ones, or how my Wooden Railway Bertram didn't have a tender, things like that. This new Toby is undoubtedly going to be one of *those* kinds of toys for kids like I used to be, the kids that'll grow up to be forever-fans of Thomas.

Maybe those kids will keep playing with Easy Connect Toby anyway, like I kept playing with my Take-Along James and Wooden Railway Bertram, but I believe they deserve to have versions of these toys that *don't have these issues to begin with!* I know I was extremely happy back in the day to see Take-Along James updated with black wheels, as well as a decade later when a new Wooden Railway Bertram was made that gave him that elusive tender. Maybe someday there can be a Toby V2 that fixes these issues. I hope that day comes soon, because I'd hate for this to be the final word on Toby in the Easy Connect metal engine line until the next generation of Thomas, whenever that'll happen...

On a more positive note, I do think Toby's new face is one of the better ones from this wave. Others in the fandom have been dunking on it, comparing him to The Rizzler and such, but I think it's very recognizably Toby. He's an old man with old man jowels, like he usually is. He may be a bit chopped, but that feels in line with him as a character.

So, yeah. That's Easy Connect Toby. Definitely a 1 out of 5. I don't want to talk about him anymore. I'm just glad I managed to get this out of my system before his upcoming re-release in the deluxe assortment with Henrietta... oh my god i'm going to have two of these things in my house, what am i doing

Unfortunately, much like Diesel in the last review, I don't have any predecessors in this exact scale to compare Rosie to. I did actually want to get the recent Metal Collection re-release of Trackmaster Push Along Rosie, since it felt fitting to compare the first ever diecast of Rosie in this livery to the new Rosie, but she never showed up in any of my local stores, and I didn't want to buy her *just* for the sake of having a comparison shot here. So here's a smorgasbord of all the Red Rosie toys I own, to fill the void.

I will say that this new Rosie immediately trips out the door by omitting a lot of painted detail that really makes the Red Rosie look cool. She's got no boiler bands, no lining on the cylinders, no gold on her running board. The prototype of her shown at toy fair did have the gold on her cylinders and running board (no boiler bands, though), so I have to assume those were planned to be featured on the model but got cut at some point to keep the deco budget down. I'm usually pretty accepting of these kinds of things, because sometimes designers have to make hard choices when they're developing a mass-market product that's beholden to a corporate budget. However, these are some pretty integral details to Rosie's look here, and without them she just kinda becomes a sea of red. All I'm saying is that it was bad that this happened, and I hope at some point in the future there can be some kind of running change made to the toy to add these details back in at some point in the future.

Unfortunately, that's not where Rosie's problems end, because she's also... weirdly short? Like, she's weirdly low to the ground, which isn't at all what her CGI model looked like. It gets even weirder when you put her next to the other engines this wave and notice she's the shortest engine of the bunch! For some reason, even though the scaling paradigm for this toyline seems to be "every engine's cab roof is the same height", Rosie is inexplicably shorter than everybody else. I don't think this is something that could've been derived from the CGI model sheets, since Rosie's supposed to be a little bit bigger and chunkier than Thomas.

It seems like, intentionally or not, Rosie was made shorter than all the other engines *despite* the what the scale chart and model sheets would say. This is incredibly weird, and not usually how this design team rolls! Usually they're pretty militant about adhering to very specific details of the CGI model sheets, but it seems like everyone involved in making this toy *wanted* her to be shorter than the standard engine height. Because making the girl engine of the wave the short and diminutive one with explicit skimping out on her painted details totally isn't a sexist look or anything...

I want to try and end this on a less sour note, so I do want to point out the few things this model does okay. Firstly, she's the heaviest out of all the basic metal engines this wave! Personally that isn't usually part of my calculus regarding whether one of these is good or not, but there's an annoyingly large contingent of people who care about that, so there you go! There's one area she excels in. Secondly, while I'm not really a *huge* fan of it, I think Rosie's new face is... alright. It definitely feels more like a Kana face than a Rosie face, what with the awful insistence on almond-shaped eyes with eyeliner that's being forced en masse onto the girl characters in Thomas, but I've come around on it as a design. Definitely not as good as the classic Rosie face, but like... it's fine.

There, that's Easy Connect Rosie. She's incredibly disappointing, especially considering she's finally achieved main character status and returned from the void she was banished to during All Engines Go!, and I'm half-tempted to 3D design some replacement parts to try and fix these issues. If a toy design motivates me to develop an upgrade kit just to make it clear the bar, that's a bad sign. She's like, a 2 out of 5.

Diesel's last two toys in this scale were Trackmaster Push Along/Metal Collection Diesel, which is a typical 2018 suckbrick that I don't even own and as a result can't take comparison photos with, and Metal Collection Diesel from All Engines Go, which is a perfectly fine toy but is different enough in terms of design ethos that comparing the two isn't terribly helpful. Unfortunately, I haven't got any other diecast Diesel toys, so uh... there's not really a lot I can do in the way of comparison to past toys. I suppose I don't really need to, anyway, but I think it's part of the fun with how this new toyline is giving so many characters their first toys in decades, yknow?

Anyway, Diesel's pretty good! I only have two points of complaint with him, the rest of him is pretty perfectly Diesel. Firstly; Diesel has gray wheels instead of black ones, and that strikes me as odd. Toby and several other characters in this range sport black (or at least near-black, we'll get back to that) wheels, so I'm not sure why Diesel couldn't. I'd assume it was to avoid going too heavy on the black usage out of fear of unmarketability, but Mavis seems to be getting properly black wheels, so I dunno...

The other point is that Diesel's front bonnet (I believe this is the correct term for the part of his body that's not his cab?) is a bit fatter than I think is true to the character. It's not by much, I think overall this sculpt is acceptable, but it has the knock-on effect of making the toolboxes sculpted into his sides feel very shallow, when I think they should be a bit more pronounced. I think out of all modern Diesel toys based on his CGI character model, the 2022 Thomas Wooden Railway Diesel has the best proportions of the bunch. That toy is like... really really good. Really wish they'd made a Paxton out of it.

Anyway, those are my only two complaints about the entire toy. Everything else is great to me, even the face! Diesel drew a pretty good lot in the Getting A New Face lottery for 2026, it feels very reminiscent of his All Engines Go! characterization. He's a smug rival to Thomas, thinks he's better than the rest, and is a bit of a troublemaker. This face captures that very well! I wish all the characters being transferred to this new face design style could make the leap so gracefully.

(It also helps that it's basically just a more cartoon-y version of the face that 2022 Thomas Wooden Railway Diesel had, that may be winning it some brownie points.)

I never noticed it until looking at Diesel, but the majority of "black" pieces on these toys (such as on smokeboxes and chassis and cab roofs) actually have a tint of blue to them, so they're not quite a pure black. I think it looks a lot better than the brown-ish shade of black they used on the Classic-style toys last year, but it does look a bit strange when put next to characters whose deco includes a more pure black. Diesel is one of those characters, so you can kinda notice the difference between the pure black of his metal body paint + plastic top piece and the bluish-black of his chassis. I don't think this detracts from Diesel at all, but it is something interesting I wanted to point out.

Diesel is without a doubt the best of this wave's basic diecast engines. The Troublesome Truck still beats him out in terms of sheer perfectness, but he's still doing pretty good for himself. I'd say he's a 4 out of 5 compared to Thomas and Percy's 3 out of 5. Here's hoping they make a Paxton in this toyline!

First impression with Easy Connect Percy is that his relationship to Metal Collection Classic Percy is very similar to those ranges' respective Thomases, namely that Easy Connect does a lot of things *way* better while also stumbling in a few ways where Metal Collection excelled. It's even the exact same strong points; better sculpted detail, more defined cab roof and bunker, not being quite so wide in the chassis and rods, doing away with the All Engines Go!-derived slant going up the body's height... Classic Percy was always kinda weird anyway, what with his baby eyes and lacking neck and number font taken from the toy train version of the show model rather than the actual character model. In some ways, it's no surprise Easy Connect Percy should be able to dog walk this thing.

That said, there are some shortcomings. For one thing, his smokebox seems a bit large? Ideally, Percy's face should be the same size as Thomas', yet here it's way bigger. It looks roughly proportional compared to the size Metal Collection Classic Percy's smokebox was to his saddle tank, so I have to assume this was a side-effect of making the saddle tank larger to accommodate for width gained by getting rid of that awful body slant Classic Percy had. I just think it doesn't look great, is all. There's a lot of CGI Scale Chart-derived nonsense in this toyline, as is the case with pretty much every post-CGI toyline that tries to make use of that style guide. We're going to have to spend a long time unpacking each of those instances whenever they pop up...

Another thing is that, even though the sculpted detail is *better* than on Classic Percy, there's still some weird things going on here. such as how the inner half of Percy's toolbox are part of the smokebox piece rather than a continuation of the metal body. I suppose there may have been a manufacturing reason to do them like this, but it looks a bit weird. Also weird is the fact the sides of the coal bunker lack the grate detail usually present on Percy's bunker, which is *especially* odd considering it's present on the back of his coal bunker. I can't think of any reason to exclude this detail, logistical or budgetary, so it's odd to see it omitted...

The real upsetting part of this design is that there's no gold for the whistle and dome. This was one of the few truly perfect details on Classic Percy, using the typical brilliant plastic insert for color separation that Metal Collection excelled with, and it's just... gone! There's not even any kind of gold paint application on the dome, there's just nothing. When Easy Connect Thomas was missing a gold whistle, it was disappointing, but ultimately something I could get over, since it's a pretty common compromise made on toys of Thomas. Percy missing the gold is a way bigger deal, because it's a key feature of his character design that's now missing. It'd be one thing if his dome being green now was an intentional design choice for this new generation, but no! It's still gold on the packaging and promo art! To add insult to injury, the gold plastic technique *is* being used on Easy Connect Motorized Percy!

It's truly baffling to me that one of the best design ideas from Metal Collection is being abandoned so frequently in this toyline. They could also probably use this technique to give Percy some green cylinders, if they so desired, since they're just an unpainted part of the red running board as it stands. But nah, can't do that, for whatever reason...

Easy Connect Percy is still a perfectly fine toy of Percy the Small Engine, but it's not as good as the Thomas from this toyline. I think it still clears the bar overall, it's a perfectly fine toy train, but in terms of representing Percy it fails at capturing a fair few of the minor details the kind of poindexter-y under-3s the Thomas brand cultivates will no doubt be looking for. I'd still say it's a 3/5, clears the bar, but isn't as good as Thomas.

The new Thomas is very similar to the Classic Thomas that was released last year, but sports the Easy Connect system's magnetic connectors rather than the Plarail-derived hooks and loops of the Trackmaster era. While this has been a controversial change, I do think it was the right one to make. The majority of toy trains on the market for kids nowadays are wooden ones with magnetic connectors, so making the motorized and metal toys capable of cross-playing with them is in the toyline's best interests for the survival. It's not like it's a problem that can be solved by reviving Thomas Wooden Railway for a third time, either, because that line flopped on account of just becoming far too expensive to cut it compared to other wooden trains. Meanwhile, the motorized and metal trains are more detailed and are more affordable, so giving them compatible magnets and track sizes makes them far more competitive within this space. It's a smart choice and one I will continue to defend.

Easy Connect Thomas has better sculpted detailing than Metal Collection Classic Thomas, and manages to correct a lot of issues that toy had. The slanting on the sides of the body has been fixed, the cab roof is now a separate piece of plastic and achieves greater depth than the bald-looking printed black roof, and the lamp on the running board is sculpted to much more closely resemble what the lamp actually looks like! However, there are a few areas where this Thomas fails to do better than his predecessor.

Firstly, Metal Collection Classic Thomas uses a gold piece of plastic to represent Thomas' whistle, whereas Easy Connect Thomas just has them as part of the cab sculpt, with no paint applications or anything to pick them out. I don't think it would have been hard to implement a similar plastic whistle into this design, and it would've improved the toy greatly to have that little splash of gold right there. I do have to wonder if the parts budget for the Easy Connect basic engines is lower than it was for Metal Collection's basic engines, because the excellent use of plastic parts for color separation on specific details has been massively reduced...

The other issue is that, from a side profile, Easy Connect Thomas looks somewhat strange, like he's been stretched vertically. His running board does ride slightly higher than Metal Collection Classic Thomas, but I don't think that's where the issue comes from, because he looks perfectly fine from the front view. It's just that side view, where there's this huge gap between the tops of his wheels and the bottom of the running board. Examining the toys more closely, the standard-size wheels for Easy Connect engines are roughly 1mm smaller in diameter than the standard-size wheels for Metal Collection engines, and I think that size difference is responsible for this gap.

I think that while Metal Collection Classic Thomas benefits from having a more 'filled out' side profile, the proportions of Easy Connect Thomas are better on the whole, since Classic Thomas has the issue of looking kind of hideous from a front view with how far the wheels and siderods stick out. Classic Thomas also has that issue where his front axle doesn't line up with his splasher, and that will never not bother me... I understand why it was designed this way, since the ideal position for the front axle is where the screw into the smokebox has to go, but still sucks...

In terms of play, Easy Connect Thomas is a winner. It's pretty difficult to mess up the playability push-along diecast toy train (at least, when it comes to one as simple as Thomas, tender engines may be another story), so I tend not to talk about this very extensively when reviewing these toys, but it has to be said that performance-wise he's perfect. Since he still fits the same gauge as past motorized and wooden toylines, he can play on those track systems with ease. His wheelbase is slightly narrower than the past diecasts who fit on these kinds of tracks, so there may be some specialty pieces he'll foul, but in the majority of situations he'll be perfectly fine.

It's time to talk about the face now. It's all anybody really wants to talk about with regards to this toyline and... Well, in the Bell Station review, I said that I'd come around on this face when I saw it in person. But, when I got my hands on the metal Thomas and got him out of the packaging, I didn't feel quite as positively, which was really confusing.

Comparing the two now, it seems that the copy of the face used on the plastic clones of the metal engines has slightly shallower features, and uses more white around the eye printing. It's kind of incredible that such minute differences can make this big a difference to what is ostensibly the same sculpt across two toys. The metal version of Thomas looks tired to me. He's got much more emphasized eyelids than I'm used to, and that combined the forced-looking smile makes him seem like he's putting on a cheery act for the kids at home, but inside he just wants to end it all. Meanwhile, the plastic version *actually* looks like the sociable, cheeky, and bold engine he's intended to be.

It feels weird to call the cheapo plastic clone the superior version of this toy... mostly because it isn't, the metal body and its actual tampograph printing feels a lot better than the inkjet printing on the plastic body... but the face difference alone makes the plastic version compelling to me. I think once I have a spare copy of Thomas, I'm going to drill that one apart and replace its face with the one from the spare plastic Thomas I have. That'll be my definitive Easy Connect Thomas.

On the whole, while Easy Connect Thomas has some issues, I would say he's perfectly okay. He manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls suffered by the Metal Collection Classic Thomas, and while there is room to improve on this design, I don't think anybody in the actual target demographic for this toy is going to be left terribly wanting thanks to how playable it is. I'd say he's like, a 3 out of 5, if you want me to give some kind of objective numerical score. Which may sound bad if you're American Educational System-pilled, but on my personal scale you don't need to worry unless a toy dips down to a 2 or a 1. He clears the bar, to put it simply.

On paper, this set is a real winner. It's a fun and functional train set with a beautifully detailed docks-plus-farmers-market centerpiece, with an infinite loop of loading and unloading that should entertain kids for hours. It's even versatile too, with how you can just keep the gimmick off and allow trains to run in a loop without doing any deliveries. Cranky himself could be better, considering that aside from his face he has nothing in the way of paint applications, but he serves his role well and has a pretty good face. What could there possibly be to complain about with this set?

Well, if you've been paying attention to my recent output, you will know that I've had some issues with this set, specifically pertaining to my copy coming with a defective cargo car. See, the entire set basically hinges on the special cargo car's ability to dump the tomato/cucumber cargo into the farmer's market, which will then slide the secret chute that puts it behind the shipping container Cranky opens up to give Thomas some "fresh" cargo. My copy of the cargo car would not unload the cargo, basically making the set's gimmick inoperable. I've never seen anybody else online run into this issue with the cargo car in this set, so it seems among the quality control errors the motorized Easy Connect toys have been facing, this appears to be an isolated incident.

I tried to get into contact with Mattel support for a replacement Cargo Car, but didn't have any luck. So, like any completely sane person who just bought a defective product, I bought a second copy of the set. I didn't do this *just* for the cargo car, I actually wanted to buy a second copy of this set anyway just to bolster my selection of track for layout-building reasons, but it does sting that this incident essentially forced my hand early. Anyway, my second Cargo Car functions perfectly normally, and looking underneath it seems the issue was that the little lever that engages the dumper part of the car somehow ended up pushed inside the chassis, as opposed to poking out such that it can engage with the activation tabs.

If these cargo cars were held together with screws, this could have been an issue I'd easily fix on my own, because the solution only requires a screwdriver and some careful repositioning of this lever. However, none of the motorized Easy Connect rolling stock have any external screw holes, or any obvious way to take them apart period. I'd essentially have to destroy the cargo car apart in my attempt to open it up and fix it. It seems to be a recurring theme with the new Easy Connect toys that screws are a no-no, and I think it's awful. I don't believe they're being designed this way out of any kind of safety consideration, because the All Engines Go toys were all geared toward the same age demo and they featured screw construction. It seems to just be a choice based on the personal taste of the designers, and it's a design decision i find both baffling and consumer-hostile. I hope in the future they can bring back the screws to these toys, because this was an easily avoidable problem that was made unsolvable by these design decisions.

Since my experience with that faulty cargo car seems to be a freak minority case, I'm not going to hold it against the set in terms of reviewing it, because aside from that there's very little to complain about with this train set. It's fun and well-detailed, and definitely would make a kid's birthday or Winter Holiday a special one... so long as there are no QC errors. I think the one true complaint I have about this set on a design level is that I wish the Market and Cranky could be more easily separated. I completely understand why they aren't, because they need to complete that secret chute for the infinitely-looping play pattern, but the permenant tab and slot connection limits the usability of Cranky and the Market as individual destinations on a layout. This is part of the reason I wanted a second copy of this set, so I could have my complete Docks plus Market apparatus as well as the two components individually for diversity in layout building options.

This set comes with a motorized Thomas! Unlike the non-metal Thomases that came with Bell Station and Tidmouth Sheds, this one is identical to the version that's being sold separately in the motorized engine assortments, so I feel pretty confident giving it a quick review here to save myself the trouble later on! This set doesn't include the standard version of the Cargo Car that you would get if you were to order a separate-sale Thomas right now, but like, I don't think I'd have much to say on it. It's a 7-plank wagon, it doesn't have a face, and it's nice that that's a thing that's available for year one of the toyline but it doesn't scale with the metal Troublesome Trucks so it's not as great an inclusion as it could be. Whoop-de-do.

I feel similarly about the motorized Thomas as I do the motorized Percy I reviewed in the last post. He's well-proportioned, his face doesn't make me feel as violent as I thought it would when I saw the promo renders (although somehow the motorized face doesn't feel as charming as the metal engine face, and I'm not sure why considering they're basically identical sculpts), and neither of my copies seem to be riddled with the commonly experienced Easy Connect Motorized Engine Woes. It's kinda hilarious how this set bit me with a QC bug and it *wasn't* the common one. Assuming you aren't bitten by the QC bug either, I think he'd be a fine pickup, although I feel like there won't much reason to pick him up from the seperate-sale motorized engine assortment. At least, not yet. Right now you can only get him with that boring cargo car, but later in the year there'll be a version where he's packed with S.C. Ruffey instead of the cargo car, and *that* will be the one to look out for. Otherwise, I'd say you should only bother with him if you get him in a train set like this one.

On the whole, this is a good train set when it's not giving you QC grief. To it's credit, it seems QC grief is rare with it (at least in terms of the set itself, whether or not your Thomas works is another matter), but it is worth keeping in mind. I'd say this is better than Tidmouth Sheds, but not quite as good as Bell Station.

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.