THESE ARE SOLEY MY OPINIONS AND NOT FROM THE THOMAS & FRIENDS FAN BASE
NWR EDITORIAL:
TRACKMASTER'S 2014 DESIGN CHANGE
Trackmaster has been going on in the market since 2008 replacing the Tomy battery train sets, which are still going strong in Japan to this, known as Plarail. In 2014 HIT Entertainment and Fisher Price have recently released new design changes to their Trackmaster range, replacing the bland brown track with grey and flimsy looking grey track and squashed up engines and rolling stock.
I'm no fan of Trackmaster toys, I don't collect battery toys anymore, but on occasions I do, which is Plarail from Japan and no I have no big collection. However just going by how fans complain about the new format there's an option you can either give up on the new set and complain about it or realistically take the time to get use to the new changes. I don't have a good memory but I believe there were some fans out there in the Thomas community who complained about the older Trackmaster toys replacing the old Tomy sets, despite that they can fit on blue track unlike the new ones.
Now there's a petition going around the internet, I'm not going to give a link for it, to have the old designs back of the toy. To me they are just toys designed for the prime target of Thomas the Tank Engine, young children. To me the petition is worthless and I know they'll be some saying 'But who's going to care about the DVD petition?!' yes they're just DVDs but there is come good coming out of it. If HIT and Universal listen to the fans, parents wouldn't have to be worried about buying an amount of Thomas DVDs that has episodes that they've never seen before and avoid them for buying some DVDs overseas. A petition to change the design of toys just because some fans aren't used to change is worthless. Yes it cost money, the toys and sets, but if a petition to change towards the old design happened then it's still going to cost money. I'm not insulting fans of the Trackmaster range but sometimes fans need to either give up on the range and move on to something else or take the time to get use to it and there could be some good coming out of it. If you don't like the new changes in the range then just don't buy them.
There are some poorly designed toys from pre-2014 Trackmaster as well, such as the Light up Thomas:
Light-UpThomas.jpg)
Some parents have criticised about the earlier Trackmaster sets being too difficult to deal with and that some trains don't work well. In the end not everything is perfect and that's all I have to say. If I've offended some fans of Trackmaster, I apologise.