Quick Question

Hey guys.

So i've been thinking that if the Aresdale engines were rendered in TOMY style, would they be Plarail advance engines?

Most of the Engines in the advance range are either long electrics sporting the streamlined look (whoosh!) or that one tender engine which i think bears a striking resemblance to a certain D51 loco. So the aresdale engines would fit snugly!

The scale to the regular gauge engines would be correct, as is the wheel configuration and such.

What do you guys think? Feel free to discuss!

Personally *if* Tomy were to carry on exploiting the Thomas range putting the effort into producing PlaRail Advance versions would be a stunning marketing move for them. PlaRail Advance are effectively N Gauge at a pocket money price, seeing how expensive the older TomyTec N Gauge Thomas range are even when old and tatty I think they would sell an incredible amount of PlaRail Advance.

As you point out the longer length Thomas trains such as Gordon would naturally fit into the range as they would be the correct proportion. Thomas and the smaller tank engines would be more of a challenge and would probably require the engine to be in one of the coaches or something, but I'm sure it would be possible if they put their mind to it.

I thought all of motors were in the coaches or middle cars of the Advance line.

(08-29-2016, 01:55 PM)Super Wrote: I thought all of motors were in the coaches or middle cars of the Advance line.

Indeed they are Super, usually in the 2nd of 4 coaches, this is partly to allow for a standard chassis and also the fact that they move in both directions as the on switch has a reverse function.

There is no reason though that you couldn't fit the battery & motor into the body length of a Gordon, but you'd physically not be able to get it all into a Thomas in the same scale.

One other thing to bear in mind is that at the moment all the cars in an Advance are a custom length, in fact the modelling of the chassis is standard, all that changes is the covers on the top of them.

Of course the reason for this is to keep production costs down as there are only one set of tooling needed. But I reckon with the potential sales they could get it would be more than worth it.

How are the two Advance steam trains powered?

The motor/battery are located in the first coach behind the tender, the pushroads etc... still work, but the engine itself is non-powered.

Then that would work with something like Thomas and Friends right or was that what you were saying??

(08-29-2016, 08:31 PM)Super Wrote: Then that would work with something like Thomas and Friends right or was that what you were saying??

That's exactly what I was saying sort of , you could potentially build the drive/battery into the body of the larger engines, but for the smaller ones like Thomas you'd probably need to put it into a carriage or wagon. Thing is if they are small carriages like Thomas's ones the scale would be a bit odd as they wouldn't be long enough for the mechanism. Unless of course they decided to use those half length AAA's...

Yeah, about the custom cars, the aresdale rock hopper cars as seen in Legend of the lost treasure are pretty long

One problem with Plarail Advance is that it uses the normal track system, meaning each train would have to be on one side of the track instead of in the center. If they made a smaller track system the same width as the grooves on normal track, it might have been able to work. Either that, or they could've added middle grooves to normal track pieces in order to make "solo" trains look better (therefore making the track "dual gauge"):