Trackmaster Alfie Research

@Tharazero, I know he probably is wrong, but I am curious as to where he got that from.

Me too

@Thara True, but even when you are in the right place and there at the right time, the prices tend to be very high, easily £100 or more will be asked for one which is quite a lot of money for a motorised toy vehicle

@diamonddalek I think that there’s no place we’re you could get an Alfie for 100 pounds or less, it’s just unheard of. If you want to spend less than that then your gonna have to do a lot of digging, and be really patient. In my opinion, anything under $500 Canadian for an Alfie can be considered a good deal, considering his rarity and the amount made

@TZ1 Yeah, it would be a miracle to find one for below £100, heck it would be a shock to find one for less than £200

Hi guys,

After that crazy Alfie auction that ended on eBay around a month ago, I took it upon myself to actually go in depth about it and learn a bit more about him just to see whether the price the Auction ended up selling for could be justified. First of all I made a twitter group of users who owned Alfie to see what production dates were under each of their Alfie's, because thanks to HiT toys, each of their trains and motorised vehicles was had a production date stamped to the bottom of the chassis, which made it much easier to document when each Alfie was produced. Then I started asking individual owners for photos

First I'll tell you how to read these production stamps, thanks to the help of GWRDuck. These are stamped as 000S0, with the first 3 zero's showing the day in the year these were produced, and the 0 after the S showing the year.

Now onto the research. Thanks to all the users who I contacted and their help, I have a sample of 17 Trackmaster Alfie's. Funny enough, out of the 17 Trackmaster Alfie's we have, all of them only come from the same 3 production dates that I've found, no other dates apart from the 3 I've found appear on the bottom of Trackmaster Alfie's.

These three dates are:

6th of April 2008 (098S8)
7th of May 2008 (136S8)
4th of June 2008 (167S8)

Images of these:


And out of the samples I've acquired, 6 were produced on April 6th, 7 on May 16th and 4 on June 4th. Furthermore, any Alfie you find will only have one of these three production dates stamped underneath it. If you find a different production date stamped underneath an Alfie please post a photo of it here.

Furthermore, thanks to the help of ajtrain944, we've actually come into contact with a person who was director at HiT Toys, and he says that only around 300 Alfie's were produced before being pulled off shelves, which can also be proved by the fact that we only have 3 production dates of Alfie. It's highly likely that only around 100 Alfie's were produced on each day, with the factories also having to produce other HiT Toys items at the same time.

This not only proves that Alfie is on very rare item, with him only have 3 production dates over the course of his whole production life, but it also discounts the opinions and theory's of those made by many other users who I've come across, saying it was an item produced over the course of many months, perhaps even a year and therefore is in fact not rare. Thanks to my research, I've found out that the Trackmaster Alfie is actually the 4th rarest Motorized Thomas item, beating out the likes of the Donald and Douglas Snow Plough Set, Trackmaster Monty and even the Blushing Face Thomas, and only being beaten out by the likes of the Golden, Silver and Party Flags Thomas'.

We also know that the colour's of Alfie's cargo were inverted over the course of his production life, however, I'm unable to pinpoint when this changed happen as I'd only be able to find out from opening BNIB Alfie's to see, and with the shear rarity of a BNIB Alfie (rarest thing there is, even rarer than a Gold Thomas, only 3 known to exist), I don't think we'll ever be able to find out

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped me with this research and pile all of this together.

Twitter: @CalleyFan @BradyLikesTrain @GWRDuck @SixSmallWheels @Andy_Sandy3

Instagram: @Thomas_fan_4

BPT: @MuddyPoppins @Bkvir208 @confusedanddelayed @ajtrain944

Good Luck to anyone searching for an Alfie, I hope you guys now know the true rarity of this item now, and also a rough idea of what you would have to pay for one if you do want one. 

Relevant to the cargo inversion discussion, I just realized I somehow procured Alfie's cargo. Not sure, but I suppose it was included in some odd lot of trains I purchased over the years. But in any event, it is the reverse of the one in your photo. I've attached photos in case they're of any use, but the only marks on the underside is a "made in China" stamp and the #4. Perhaps this is will be of use? And great research on the batches. I would think a limited production of 300 puts Alfie as being one of the more rare thomas items?

That's very weird, my one has the stamp #1 underneath and is the inverted colour to yours. Could be onto something here. If anyone else has Alfie's cargo could you post a picture of the underside just to see what were working with here

I wish I had alfie to be able to assist in this, but sadly I don't, you guys are making some very interesting discoveries, that's for sure!

Huge thanks to @thekaikkistore on Twitter, from a photo of their Alfie, we can see that there was actually another date: July 6, 2008 (188S8)! This means that at least 4 batches were actually made.