Unreal Stunts Done With a “Thomas the Train” Toy

I’m not a Thomas the Train fan mostly because I think the show is a little creepy but I’ll admit that the stunts performed with the toys are pretty cool and even impressive. It’s a matter of knowing how the toy is going to react, how it will fall, and how best to catch that fall and redirect the toy when it happens though, and that’s what impresses me. You really need to look at the shape, the mass, and the velocity that the toy will have when coming off of the surface of the track and then what trajectory it will need to take in order to land where you want it to. The rest is just kind of luck and trying to anticipate what’s going to happen.

I’m not an engineering student, otherwise I might be able to spit some terminology as to the hows and whys of this stunt and how it can work but from a fundamental standpoint there are a lot of variables that have to be taken into account. The weight of the toy, the speed it can get up based on its durability, level of wear, construction, the tracks and their durability and if they’re the tiniest bit warped or not and several other things. Obviously the tracks have to be laid smooth and even in some portions of the course and canted at just the right angle in other portions to facilitate forward motion.

Then the speed has to be a factor since it has to be great enough that the train can actually roll up the incline without losing too much momentum but not so great that it simply flies off the track when it goes uphill. Too much speed on a small toy like this and the wheels also might not be able to handle it since they’re simple little wooden discs connected by a dowel that runs through the body of the train. But I can still honestly say that I’m impressed by this ingenuity and the thought that was put into the stunt.

I do wonder just how long it took to set up up and how many times they had to run the same course just in case anything did happen that wasn’t expected or had to do with the course being the tiniest bit out of whack. Like I said there are so many variables to watch that a person could go crazy trying to do everything at once. But anyone that sets up a course like this no doubt tries to plan for everything they possibly can. Believe it or not this course is fairly simple despite the fact that a good deal of effort was put into it, but it’s still something that a lot of people would call a job well done.

When I was a kid I can remember building things such as this in an attempt to see just how far I could launch a toy car or how complicated I could make an obstacle course. A lot of my efforts didn’t pan out as I’d wanted them to but some of them worked. It’s the successes that tend to make it all worthwhile.