fall inside a hole
Subway Rail Set (2007)
Originally written December 14, 2023
The Subway Rail Set (地下レールセット, literally "underground rail set") was released in 2007 slightly ahead of the 2008 individual release of the R-25 Underground Straight Rail and J-26 Underground Station and includes a loop of track with five subway tunnels and a subway station. There is no train included, although a variety of commuter trains are shown on the box.
Set contents
| Quantity |
Item |
Photo |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | R-03 Curve Rail |
 |
| 5 |
R-25 Underground Straight Rail |
 |
| 1 | J-26 Underground Station (blue) |
 |
The focal points of this rail set is obviously the new subway tunnels which would not be released individually until the following year. The tunnels can all be stacked and connected in a variety of ways and look rather nice when you have many of them around one another. The stacking features are based on the J-24 and J-25 clear tunnels, themselves seemingly descended from the stacking panel station system.
The regular subway tunnels are nice and remind me of the subway tunnels I have been in in New York City and other places (although I have never been on a Japanese subway). The stacking and molding features are clever and allow multiple to be connected together and even partially support one another when elevated. The tracks and inside of the tunnel do have some nice detailing. The bottom is marked 2007 as well as 1959 which was something Tomy was doing around this time in the mid-late 2000s.
The station section is even nicer, with an integrated stop rail that can be switched from either side of the station. One side has more of a station wall with stairs leading down to ticket machines and gates. The stairs are actually set up in a way where they can tessellate into multi-level staircases when multiple station are stacked and connected. The inside of the station has a route map and stickered seating as well as a nice yellow line to signify where to stand behind when the train arrives. The individual release of this station introduced in 2008 is grey instead of blue.
According to the back of the box, the sticker sheet for this set originally included some stickers for indicating which stations were in either direction on the line as well as some "traffic light" stickers that could be applied to the tunnel pieces to represent signals. It does not appear that the previous owner of my set decided to use any of these stickers.
The rails in my used copy of the set are a mix of 1992 and 1998 dated Thailand made rails. I am not entirely sure which, if either, were original to this set.
The "intended" layout for this set is obviously basic although I do think it is still fun to run a Plarail subway train around on. The pieces of the set are clearly meant to be incorporated into a larger more interesting layout, and some of the scenes shown on the back of the box are pretty nice setups. I have a number of other regular subway tunnel pieces I think perhaps ten in total with the five from this set) and I would like to get some of the individual stations (perhaps two to be able to build a multi-level station and show how the staircases connect) and set up a subway layout using these pieces.