50-Piece Thomas & Friends Trackmaster Thomas & Nia Cargo Delivery

For new parents who aren't invested in trains yet, here's some advice...

Wooden tracks
The old school wood track sets seem better for free building. Kind of like taking a bucket of Legos and building based on your imagination. The wooden tracks seem simpler and easier to put together. And they are much cheaper if you buy non-Thomas branded track.

You can get cheap wooden tracks off Amazon. And since they are simple, durable, and consistent, you can often get them second hand. It becomes easy to amass a giant bin of wooden tracks for 4+ year olds to free-play with.

Thomas branded track and buildings, however, are expensive. You can often find them 2nd hand for cheap. But when buying new, official Thomas stuff is always priced high.

Plastic Trackmaster
These work really well. But, they are more Thomas specific. I don't know if 3rd parties make track for this. So the prices are high. They are tougher to assemble than the wooden track pieces. Especially for young children.

Based on the 2 sets I have, they seem less welcoming to building configurations outside of what the box shows. If your play space is an area where you want to frequently disassemble the track for cleaning or to switch toys, this can be a pain. It means that every time you pull the track back out, you may feel the need to re-assemble everything per the instructions.

Wooden structures like sheds can be expensive. Especially when buying new and officially Thomas branded. The plastic Trackmaster sets excel here since the price for the set as a whole is good.

Motorized trains
When it comes to the motorized engines, I've noticed the ones intended for wooden track perform differently than the Trackmaster engines.

The Trackmaster engines seem more like sports cars. They are faster, but they are intended to be used on the more pristine plastic tracks. They seem to perform more poorly on wooden track. Especially when hills are involved. And they seem to have less torque. This means they struggle more when pulling lots of cars. Especially, once again, when they encounter wooden track and hills.

The motorized engines intended for wooden track are much slower. But, they do seem to have more torque. They do much better hauling lots of cars. And since wooden tracks tend to be less precise and calculated, the slower speed reduces the chance of trains tipping off the track.

Combining Trackmaster and wood
If you Google "connect trackmaster to wooden track", you can find adapters to connect the two track types. These can allow you to combine the fun of specific locations or scenes with the open-ended free building of wooden tracks.