It started with a first birthday gift.
A friend got my son a Thomas the Tank Engine train for his first birthday. He liked, but didn’t love it, at first. He played with it on occasion for the first few weeks. The next month, he played with it a lot, then he forgot it existed. This cycle continued for a few months…
Until one day, that train became everything. And it somehow started multiplying.
Now I have a 3-year-old who not only knows the names of trains that only appeared in one episode back in 1991, he has the habit of correcting anyone who dares get a name incorrect. (The confidence is precocious now, though I have to get it in line because it might not be so cute when he’s 8.) We have 38 trains, all shapes and sizes, all colors and paint variations, and enough miles of wooden track to make our local transit authority jealous.
Of all the things my preschooler could be obsessed with, Thomas and Friends is pretty tame. It isn’t anything violent. Laying out the wooden track encourages creativity. It’s something he can play independently or with others. It’s not a flash in the pan — in fact, some of my son’s Thomas books were passed down from his uncles, who are now 32 and 25.
If you are new to these toys and this world, here are some tips my obsessive-research side has compiled over the course of my son’s total Thomas fandom:
Thomas on TV
There have been multiple versions of Thomas stories on American TV. The original, which many of you might have grown up with, was on a PBS show called “Shining Time Station.” You’ll remember it because the original conductor was Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. He was soon succeeded by George Carlin (yes, the comedian) and then Alec Baldwin (yes, him). The show eventually lost the human storyline that was sandwiched between the Thomas stories and just became “Thomas and Friends.”
The show was eventually acquired by Nickelodeon and then passed along to Cartoon Network and Netflix, and for many years it’s been animated instead of telling a story with model trains like the original. The most recent iteration was subtitled “Big World! Big Adventures!” and has more gender-balanced and multicultural characters, with storylines encouraging understanding and environmental responsibility.
Train types
Likewise, just as there are multiple versions on TV, there are also multiple kinds of Thomas trains. The most well-known are wooden railway trains, which are your traditional wooden models. There are also minis (they come in mystery bags or multi-packs) and Trackmasters (larger, battery-operated models.) If you buy trains on Amazon, you might come across the “adventures” line, which are metal versions of the wooden railway trains.
Thomas online
You can stream “Thomas and Friends” on Amazon Prime (seasons 1 and 18-21) and Netflix (seasons 23 and 24). But for those classic original seasons, poking around on YouTube may be your best bet — many older fans have uploaded their old VHS tapes or DVDs to YouTube, and still others (mostly from the UK) have been able to put more recent individual episodes online.
A few years ago, we went to our local thrift shop and eBay to buy the older DVDs. But when our DVD player broke, we were really in a bind.
For the super invested children, you can find videos super fans have created using their model collections, retelling the original stories and creating some of their own. There are also fans who upload videos of their massive train collections, which is great if you have a child wanting to learn the names of every single engine (like my own.)
As with all things on YouTube, watch and evaluate Thomas offerings before letting your children watch unsupervised. A few channels I let my son watch are Thomas Wooden Railway (his collection videos are amazing), Kids Toys Play’s Thomas series (created by a dad who throws in harmless jokes for the parents that will fly over kids’ heads), and Thomas and Friends UK, which is the official Thomas and Friends channel for the UK. It has more full episodes for free than its American counterpart. (Just a warning: Your child might pick up a British accent, like mine has.)
