fall inside a hole

Play Wagon Set

 

Overlay Play Wagon Set (のせかえ遊び貨車セット, possibly supposed to translate to "Loading Play Wagon Set") is an engineless three-pack released during the sixth generation of boxes on March 15, 1998. The pack includes a red well wagon with three removable pipes, an orange car carrier with a removable yellow car, and an orange flatbed with two removable blue containers. A boxed example of the Play Wagon Set in its sixth generation box can be seen in the Plarail Museum.

 

The red Toki 25000 (トキ25000) well wagon includes one each of white, orange, and light blue "pipes" which can be removed. The wagon is marked with a weight rating and has decent details on the sides and rear.

The auto carrier has a grey chassis and orange upper car cage. Unlike the previous more "chibi" style auto carrier, this one is built around the same longer chassis as the rest of the three-pack and includes a single larger and more detailed car that is similar in size to Tomica or other common toy cars. The car is still fairly simply constructed with open side windows but a stickered front windshield. The inside of the auto carrier includes indents for the car's wheels to rest in.

The flatbed includes two shipping containers that can be removed and stacked on top of one another. The containers both have magnets affixed to their inner ceilings so that a magnetic crane could load and unload and stack the containers.

All three of these carriages were originally made in Japan, are dated 1988, and use the old style single split couplers and hammered axles. All three of them actually use the same chassis mold with different tops screwed into them.

Removing the auto carrier or well wagon's shell reveals that the same locating pegs that are used on the flatbed also align with the auto carrier and well wagon.

This chassis and its various tops have remained in print in some form up to the present day, with the flatbed and containers (usually without the magnet) being reused many times over the years. The current S-25 EH500 Kintaro and S-27 EH800 Electric Locomotive both come with flatbed cars and both the auto carrier and well wagon have been reissued in different colors since. The chassis actually had axleboxes added around the time the tooling moved to Thailand and the chassis was revised to say made in Thailand and use the more modern capped axles, with a later revision updating the old curvy Tomy logo to the squared off 2003 logo.

The direct translation of the name does appear to be "Overlay" Play Wagon Set but I think the more fitting interpretation is the "Loading" or "Loading and Unloading" Play Wagon Set as all the pieces included focus on the ability to load the wagons with their respective loads, particularly the container car with the added loading play provided by the containers. I do think it is somewhat of a shame that there were not magnetic cranes produced for the containers and that future containers did not include the magnets. These new moldings all follow the trend towards more detailed toys, with the new auto carrier and well wagon eventually supplanting the older multi-level auto carrier and the smaller log wagon from the 70s that eventually went out of production.