fall inside a hole

Bonnet Express Hakucho (2002)

First written January 1, 2025
First new page of 2025!

In 1997 Tomy established October 14th as Plarail Day, releasing a special limited release train on that day every year for many years. In 2002 the special train was the Bonnet Express Hakucho (ボンネット特急白鳥), a 485 series train bearing the headmark of the Hakucho or Swan service, running between Amori and Hokkaido and offering transfers to the Tohoku Shinkansen.

The Plarail 485 series was first released as the Express (とっきゅう) train in the second-generation liftoff-style boxes. This train's tooling is based on the descendants of these toolings, with the 白鳥 Swan mark on the front and rear.

The train still has yellow wheels, signifying its place as an older tooling and train, but it has nice painted chassis ends, JR marks, and nice realistic colors and lining. The tooling for the intermediate car is based on the 0 series Shinkansen intermediate car and is descended from the mid 1980s radio control version.

Between the silver roofs and nice colors, I quite like this tooling reissue that actually depicted a current train - in fact, it seems the Hakucho service began a few months after Plarail Day in October 2002. These trains were likely all produced in September 2002 - I think the gearbox on this one needed to be repaired but had the large glued contact strip cover installed and the gearbox casing had to be cut to get it removed...