Hey BPT, this is a bit of a hard post for me to make seeing as just how passionate I am about collecting TrackMaster/TOMY toys, but I unfortunately have to say that well…
I’m no longer gonna be collecting.
Due to a lack of displayable storage in my house, I can’t find a place to neatly display and store all my items, and even when I find a place, it ends up getting a bit cluttered. And also at the moment I don’t have a whole lotta money so I can’t exactly afford any BNiB or BNiB-like Used engines right now…
So, what am I to do to rectify these issues??
Well, since June of 2024, my family and I have been working on restoring an old room in our basement that used to have a gigantic red heater in it that carried oil in it to heat our house, but ever since the home switched to gas heat, there wasn’t a purpose for it anymore. And that room is quite big too, so we thought it was a great idea to move my entire collection down there. So we got to work I believe on June 16th, 2024, and we’ve kept going from there. Getting the heater out was a TOUGH, dirty, long, arduous, and overall difficult task because of its sheer size, smell (good lord the smell was awful in that room), and the fact it had leftover oil in it too. So we knew we needed to get that oil out first. My dad thought pouring kitty litter down there would work seeing as it can soak up oil, so we’d wait about three days for it to do its thing, but it actually made it more difficult unfortunately. Because kitty litter soaks up oil…in small puddles, and it ended up making the inside look like this:
I mean I guess it gave it a cool effect but it didn’t help…at all. We also poured quite a lot down there and it was an extremely costly mistake too. That’s about $100-$125 my dad’s not getting back anymore…damn (sorry for profanity but it was a punch in the gut of his wallet.)
So afterward, about maybe a month afterward, we got to what we should’ve done at the very start of this project, draining the oil instead. How we did this was instead of using a little faucet on the underside to very slowly pour the oil out, we got a vacuum for it instead to suck it out into 5 gallon Lowe’s/Home Depot buckets. But we underestimated the difficulty of this task as we had poured about what I feel was 20 gallons of kitty little into the tank, making it heavier, and even fuller of oil raising its level up higher than it was. So after many, many days of scooping & draining the godforsaken kitty litter and oil out of the extremely smelly heater, it was finally empty & ready to be cut down via Sawzall (which my dad cut himself quite intensely & I had to bring him a bandage to him). After a little while of him cutting (it was also very noisy too) we finally started taking the heater’s pieces out of the room, and after we did that, we also took out leftover shelves that we down in that room because they were also mold-coated and rusty. The oil ended up getting picked up by someone that my dad made a deal with, and the heater and shelving went to the dump, and I ended up with $30 for compensation based on the weight of the metal, and they basically said for every 100 pounds it was 10 bucks. So I turned a profit from this project!
So the room is now finally empty! with only the lingering smell of oil and a pipe on the right side of the room that’s our main water line. Don’t worry too much about the smell, we would eventually dissipate it through leaving a couple fans on in there and spreading Gain detergent powder to cleanse the smell. It eventually did the trick after a little bit, but after that. That would be the last progress we’d make on the room for a little while, as the temperatures were getting quite cold, and the room still needed vacuuming after spreading all that power, but the cold temperatures mixed with the power of the vacuum made electricity spark in the room due to dry temperatures and was actually shocking me a little bit (it was quite painful due to the fact I’ve also got pretty bad anxiety myself as I get bad rushes very easily). So now we wait until…next Summer to continue…ughhhhh. I was quite annoyed, but I knew it was correct to wait until the temperatures stabilized so we could work again.
So now here we are, Summer 2025. We got back on the room and continued cleaning & waiting & cleaning & waiting & cleaning & waiting & yeah I think you’ve got it now. We essentially now had to put on Tyvek suits and Acid Wash the brick walls down there using a pump & sprayer. This should’ve been extremely easy to do, but I actually curled two 20-pound weights before this about 30 times on each hand, and I also held down on that trigger of the sprayer for a looong time when washing, leading to me contracting Domestic Onset Muscle Soreness (D.O.M.S.) which basically means in short, my biceps felt frozen in pain for about 2 weeks and literally couldn’t bring them down without them hurting after the washing was finished. If anything, I looked like a LEGO figure for a little while essentially. So after that cleared up, my dad had to apply Hydraulic Cement to certain areas of the cement & let it dry after a week. I couldn’t do that with him because that stuff is actually highly toxic & can ABSOLUTELY MESS UP my already sensitive skin. So I once again waited and waited for the cement to dry for 2 whole weeks seeing as my dad had to apply it twice, why? To really solidify that wall so no more leaks or trickles happen, and when we Acid Washed the wall, we made it into a clean slate for that Cement to go on, making the whole thing easier.
SO AFTER ALL THIS DANG CLEANING AND WAITING, we’re finally ready to now start the next step in painting the room…With more INSULATION! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!! Like seriously, I was just wondering when the fun stuff was gonna happen, but this was MILES more enjoyable than the previous events I listed. So me and my dad got some gray-colored epoxy for the floor, and applied 2 coats over 2 days. Then, we got to applying white Drylok on the walls, which took a while seeing as I unfortunately lost my grandma on my dad’s side of the family and the funeral was held in Indiana this month. After that sad, sad event, we got back on the room rolling the Drylok onto the walls, there needed to be 3 coats of this applied, and it was a smelly process because that Drylok gave off quite the stench, but it got easier and easier until there was no more to be applied.
This is what the room currently looks like:
(Reason the floor looks like that is because we didn’t remove this clear cover we put over it to prevent the Drylok from getting all over the floor.)
(Some fun things we did after the grueling Drylok application)
(Me & my dad’s handprints, mine is on the right, my dad’s is on the left)
(A racing stripe we made here too!)
So yeah, that’s where were at right now on improving this room for the collection to basically permanently reside in. Quite the space and effort eh? As for where the collection currently resides however…
It’s now across 3 whole closets! (One even being my room!)
Closet #1:
(AJ’s Sodor Ice Cream Factory is behind the TOMY wall, still completely BNiB)
(Here there’s a Thomas’ Egg Express & a Toys-R-Us Sir Handel both BNiB, had to move my Dodge & Flora out of the way to get a better look at everything, you’ll see this happen quite a bit with these images where I rearrange parts of the collection to get a better view of what’s in there.)
Closet #2 (have everything organized in a pattern going from HiT to F-P all the way down):
(This is extra track for displaying Used HiT Toys models, all the track is branded “HiT Toy Company” on the bottom)
(That HiT Toys Thomas base behind the Slippy Sodor Thomas was actually what that Slippy Sodor Thomas’ shell was sat on when I received it in December 2023, and it took me a WHILE to get the correct base for that shell seeing as Thomas in “Slippy Sodor” wasn’t made by HiT, rather it was made by F-P, so that is essentially just an extra base I have sitting there, it is a bit noisy but I do know how to fix those kinds of motors)
(Probably my favorite shelf here honestly, the used items here are basically in BNiB shape)
(Behind the Engine 3-pack wall, should’ve done that with the TOMY engines in the first closet)
(Behind Emily is Diesel 10, and behind Ferdinand is Diesel, and behind them are 3 Cargo & Cars packs; Brendam Shipping Co., Spaghetti & Meatball Delivery, & Blue Mountain Quarry Blast)
(Wooden Railway Kevin NiB!)
(Livestock Cars, Build a Signal, & Castle Cargo Delivery behind the Passenger Coaches & Station Repair Cars)
(Ah, the iconic closet, I will not be moving anything in here downstairs into that room, I like waking up to this every day. After all, this is the portion of the collection in my room)
(Yeah this gotta be seriously rare, because I don’t even know where it comes from, I do remember I posted images of this onto a Discussion here, and I do know Super eventually got one, congrats mate! Now Muddy, do you have one of these yet?)
(Call this “The Greatest Wall”)
(My sister gave me that postcard, turns out it was Hank’s exact real life model, being a Pennsylvania Railroad K4s Class Pacific, which there are only two of in the world right now, no. 1361 is undergoing restoration and is in use, while no. 3750 is on display at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, and they’re officially recognized as Pennsylvania’s main steam locomotives, btw, the picture is from August 4th, 1954, and photographed by Jim Fritts, and this is the no. 1361 that is still in use today)
(The very first thing I shared to this site besides this closet. Happy days those were!)
(My TOMY section here, yes all the Plarail boxes have been opened, and I opened the Stepney as well, yeah…not my one of my “Greatest Moments” you could say)
And that’s it for where everything sits right now! And really for the next few months before that room gets finished, but in this time as I said, I’m not gonna be collecting anymore…
…for another 2 months. Yeah, I’ll get back to posting like I usually do, don’t you worry about that one bit. I just need to reorganize this mess essentially. So yes, I’m still in the collecting game, I’ve just suspended operations on that, kinda like the Cleveland Browns from 1996-1998, except this is only for 2 months, not three years with a whole bunch of controversy during the moment.
In the meantime though, I did manage to acquire a few new things before I officially say goodbye, so here ya go!
First up:
TrackMaster Sir Handel + Red Coach from the HiT Toy Company in 2007!
Price: $34.99
Shipping: Free!
Total: $34.99
Location: Ronkonkoma, New York, USA
Next up (or really, the next 4 things up):
The 80th Anniversary toys! (I promise I won’t Leokimvideo these and smash them open with a rubber chicken or Mr. Hammer lol)
Price: $63.48
Shipping: Free! (Bought all at my local Walmart)
Total: $63.48
Location: Frederick, Maryland, USA
Last up:
TrackMaster Bert from the HiT Toy Company in 2009!
Price: $34.99
Shipping: Free!
Total: $34.99
Location: Allison Park, Pennsylvania, USA
And there it is, a full update on where the collecting has gone. I will see you all very soon however, as I’ve got another item to post here in a couple days! It is a TOMY engine with track I bagged for only $45 BNiB! So stay tuned for it! But until then, I don’t think I’m gonna post something this lengthy again. This took me almost 10 days to write entirely lol.
