fall inside a hole

My history with Plarail

At some point after 2001 I received and watched many times the rerelease of the Thomas the Tank Engine VHS tape "10 Years of Thomas", originally released in 1999 to celebrate ten years since the show had aired in North America. Included on the tape is footage from a Day Out With Thomas event from the late 1990s where a large Tomica World-era Thomas toy layout with the Big Thomas is shown in video footage with children looking and playing with it... This blue track with little running trains was forever burned into my memory and immediately became something I looked out for.

I first saw it for myself over at a friend's house - her family had moved from Japan, and her dad still went on business trips there, and she had a small sellection of Plarail that he had brought back for her - two Shinkansens, I think, I don't remember exactly what type, as well as Thomas and Percy. The only time I ever saw the imported Motorized Road & Rail range for sale as a kid was at a Day Out With Thomas event when HiT Toys TrackMaster had already been released and was also on sale - I got the Thomas All Aboard set as well as a HiT Toys Spencer, the only Tomy or TrackMaster set set I would have for a few years.

Although I liked the Thomas and Spencer I was dismayed by my lack of track and still rarely remember seeing TrackMaster for sale in the HiT Toy days... by the era of Mattel, however, I had my own money and started to see it more in stores, and I started buying TrackMaster pretty regularly around 2011 through to the discontinuation of classic TrackMaster based on the Tomy standards towards the end of 2014. I also started to buy classic Tomy and older TrackMaster trains and sets I saw at thrift stores and garage sales. With the discontinuation of TrackMaster toys worth buying in stores I turned more to the internet and learned more about the Plarail system and the other products available. I continued to buy Motorized Road and Rail and TrackMaster at yard sales as well as occasionally on eBay and in 2018 I imported my first package of Japanese Plarail Thomas trains. I imported a few more large boxes of stuff over the next few years and accelerated things in 2020 and 2021, buying many, many of the 1990s Thomas-series sets and trains... and a few pieces of regular Plarail. I continued to buy a few things over time before getting very, very much into regular Plarail and Japanese trains in general in 2023 and beginning to document my collection on this website.

Train Layouts

Some Plarail and related train layouts I have put together over the years. Many other older layouts I never thought or bothered to take photographs of.

Plarail, TrackMaster, and similar layouts

Time period
Description
Photo
Summer 2013-late 2015 One of the older layouts I have photos of because it was in use for several years. This was the first time I tried "landscaping" any kind of train setup and I built a large cardboard and paper mache structure that I could run multiple trains on. This layout was initially built before I owned any Plarail trains, only the exported Thomas-series Motor Road and Rail and later TrackMaster trains
late 2015-2017 After my first try at a decorated layout I decided to design another with more loops of track to actively run trains on
8 August 2018 In the late summer of 2018 I began to import some Thomas series trains and built a few layouts using new pieces I acquired from American sets like the large green suspension bridge and Cranky at the Docks
10 August 2018 Another similar layout with a focus on running trains and having a yard to shunt trucks around in
8 July 2019  Another layout similar to the 2018 layouts that uses the large green suspension bridge with a second track below it (also elevated in this case) and four large loops for trains to run around 
     
Christmas 2020 A Tomy Train Thomas layout built on Christmas Eve 2020
     
3 October 2023 "Old power" layout featuring trains, rail, and accessories primarily from the late 70s and 80s built to try out and play with many new items I had never had before from a then-recent Yahoo Auctions haul