Engines & Freight Cars
What I discovered early on with wooden train sets is that the engines and cars that are often included in the sets are fairly mundane. Thankfully there is a plethora of individual engines and freight cars available to purchase that can really add some extra fun to your wooden train collection without the cost of an entire new set.
Battery Powered Train Engines
Battery operated engines for wooden train sets have been around for a few years now from a variety of different manufacturers. In this article I’m going to try and help you make an informed decision about whether or not battery operated train engines are something that you want to get into with your child.
Most of my hands on experience is with a Thomas the Tank Engine battery operated engine and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand the toy is mostly metal and weighs enough to hold onto the track well. It appears to be pretty durable and I haven’t had any issues with it yet. I was kind of surprised at how many cars Thomas could actually pull at one time.
Hill climbs do present an issue though as the engine is not strong enough to climb most tracks on it’s own. The Thomas brand wooden train tracks actually come with raised lines painted on them to help the engine get more traction and climb easily. So if you want a battery operated engine and don’t already have any Thomas the Tank Engine brand wooden track, then you’ll at least want to get some of the ascending pieces for any elevated track segments that you may want to do in your layouts.
Another consideration is batteries. Most battery operated train engines use a single AA battery, which makes replacing easy. You’ll want to consider buying rechargable AA’s and a batter charger, otherwise your battery costs could get out of hand. I noticed with our engine that after only a few weeks of intermittent use, Thomas had slowed down considerably from battery wear-down.
Personally I’m not a big fan of adding battery operated parts to wooden train sets. When our son was given a battery powered Thomas, he went from making the trains go around the tracks himself and making all the little train noises with his mouth, to simply sitting and watching Thomas go around. It’s not always like that, at times he has Thomas running on one segment of track while he runs a train on another segment. He also waits for Thomas to get to the swivel bridge included in the Melissa & Doug Swivel Bridge set and opens and closes the bridge for Thomas. There are not very many children’s toys these days that put a lot of focus on imagination and creativity and I just don’t like the idea that a battery powered engine might remove a bit of that.
Cost is always higher with the battery powered engines as well. That might not be a huge consideration for most people though as you could easily buy just one quality engine to run on any generic wooden track.
Freight Cars
There is a wide variety of freight cars available for wooden train sets with the largest amount of them available from the Thomas the Tank Engine line of wooden trains. I sometimes have mixed feelings about Thomas products because they can sometimes be a bit expensive. But one thing that can’t be denied is that the Thomas line of wooden trains has some of the coolest and most creative accessory freight cars. One of my favorites is the aquarium cars from Thomas & Friends. The aquarium cars stretch realism to the absolute limit but your kids certainly won’t care about that.
