Info on this layout

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(11-10-2015, 11:53 PM)leylandvictory2 Wrote: Turn table does exist. One of shed do look like the shed from cranky dockyard set.

Would you know where to get the turntable leylandvictory2?

And the sheds

I think I remember some Japanese youtuber who had one of these turntables and it looked exactly like this one. Can anyone find the video because I cant
(This post was last modified: 11-11-2015, 03:17 AM by Tharazero1.)
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It doesn't seem to be a good layout as there is no continuous loop, it starts and ends with the turntable.
true. The poster wants to know where he/she can get a hand on the turntable and the shed.
Blimey, I knew the image was small but I thought I remembered seeing certain things clearer than before.

I found the image off Too Much Thomas, a website of an Australia family which for 11 years ran an exhibit featuring Motor Road and Rail, Plarail, and TrackMaster. The website's domain has expired now, but you can still see their YouTube channel here. The website had pages for each year they did their exhibit, and their earliest page featured images from overseas including this one.

I uploaded the image onto the wikia because I am sure it is an official image and back then, we were still trying to work out the past of the Plarail Thomas range, since the Plarail website goes back to 2006 following the merge of Tomy and Takara. I would love to know where it originated but I believe I will never know. Now that we have a clear understanding of the range's history, let's go over a few things about this.

[Image: WEcSUHp.png]

The buildings I've circled in yellow, I have no clear idea of what they are. I am very certain that there was never a Plarail Tidmouth Sheds or Roundhouse produced. The sheds actually remind me of a Departing Now version made by Bandai. They could all even be set dressing just to make it look fancy, or the smaller sheds could be cardboard models from books or online. The Tomica Thomas range once had some print-out buildings from its website for the short-lived track system.

[Image: NC2pF1L.jpg]

The red circles indicate something which has confused me. The coaches that Edward and Duck are pulling resemble Tomy Trains coaches, which are really tall and blocky looking. This confuses me since the Tomy Trains range was never sold in Japan. I haven't circled this bit since they're quite hard to see, but Edward, Henry, Gordon, and James look like their redesigned 2003 versions with the white running boards, but Thomas and Percy don't appear to show this.

I really like how the siding arrangement has worked out. I assume it was created using some of a Thomas and Freight Cars set, and cars from multiples of engines, maybe even from Talk 'n' Action engines. The siding from the bottom contains brown cattle vans from James and mail vans from Percy, the siding above has Gordon's green express coaches, but one siding features the red versions, the siding above that features tankers, one with both Percy's and Diesel's fuel tankers, and the highest features Troublesome Trucks and a couple of other cargo cars. Lastly, there's also two Cranky and Bulstrode at the Harbor destinations connected to each other, which looks really nice.
He does mention in another of his videos that he does use some HO scale buildings & accesories to add to what they already have. Nice family projects, its does not look like they are out to sell anything so its nice to see them just set up their show layouts for the shear joy of watching the looks on all the children's faces which are precious.
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Not to bump up a five year old thread, but I was talking with someone on Twitter about this layout and I dug up the original.

[Image: layout22.jpg]
As best I can tell the caption is
"Best Work"
Shunsuke Akiba (8 years old) Yui-chan (3 years old), Ibaraki Prefecture. Title: "Plarail Thomas Island"

I assumed this is from some sort of magazine contest, and also wanted to see when exactly it was from.

Some more digging brought up the webpage of Shunsuke
http://www3.plala.or.jp/syunsbox/index.htm

From the home page it seems to be that "Railway Toys" magazine from Neko Publishing may have been the source of the contest. I poked around the website for a while and there is a lot of interesting content

You can see they have a Departing Now collection as well, so the coaches on the layout probably are Departing Now. It seems they built a number of cool set pieces and buildings, and also installed the magnetic couplings and painted some running boards white.
I have a website where I have been writing about and photographing many of the sets and pieces that I find interesting.
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I couldn't let this sit for some reason, I knew I could find more...

The website with some of the papercraft models is still online. Not all the PDFs are intact but the ones on the main page with buildings from the layout seem to be
http://plathomas.gozaru.jp/
The oversized coaches are actually papercraft (probably based on the Departing Now models). I think some of the express coaches in the sidings are papercraft as well
[Image: Screenshot-20201022-013028-01.jpg]
It seems they beat Plarail to releasing a blue and brown express coach by probably a decade as well.
I also found an archived site with the papercrafts that have dead links on the still live site.
https://web.archive.org/web/200408031655...craft.html

I started digging around in the webring feature of the original site I found (Man, remember webrings?) and found this site
https://web.archive.org/web/200902112031...eek.co.jp/
And before long that led me to this page
https://web.archive.org/web/200408040734...niiri3.htm
...full of alternate angles of the layout. It also confirms it is from a photo contest
[Image: islandrails.jpg]
[Image: jamturn.jpg]
This confirms that the layout was probably before the real white running board engines would have come out
[Image: coachs.jpg]
I can't tell for sure, but that middle red coach does seem a little suspicious to me.

Some other cool things include a big ol' list of dates for pretty much every item up to 2003, going back to the 1992 stuff. I don't know about you, but I certainly did not know the release day of the 1993 Henry set... or many other things on the list.
https://web.archive.org/web/200607012249...eek.co.jp/
It's the third link under the last header on the left side, towards the bottom.

Anyway, I have no idea if anyone else is that interested in this layout, I had honestly mostly forgotten about it until someone asked me if I knew anything about it, and I figured that was a good as time as any to get to know stuff about it
I have a website where I have been writing about and photographing many of the sets and pieces that I find interesting.
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Thanks Duck Smile
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