Haha, I'll send you a seedling from the tree, Super. In truth these are mostly still items I bought last summer thinking that EMS to the US would be open again, which is still not the case.
Anyways, some more sets which have arrived -
The 1995 box update to the 1992 Basic set, which also has the Thailand redesigned Thomas and the updated station with two trees instead of the token hook. The box front has changed, but the biggest change is there is now a back to the box, as the Made in Japan era sets were just liftoff lids over the foam holding all the pieces.
A rather uncommon set indeed, the short lived 1993 Henry set. Very nice condition, a Made in Japan pull off lid set. Very nice early Henry (although not my earliest, I have a Feb '93 as well), I've never seen this bigger style of date stamp before (Hard to see, Made in Japan tender engines are stamped on the black coal in black ink instead of on a sticker like Thomas was)
Being a Japan set, the station included has the token pole. This one is missing the token itself, and the paper manual I believe this set ought to have (I think I have only seen this set for sale once previously, and I don't think it had it either)
gasp A semi-modern set! I like the switching feature on this one. The Flynn was missing the roof, but the Thomas looking down-left is nice (and I believe he has a slightly different chassis then my other ones, with a bluish switch)
The 65th anniversary pack, yellow Sir Topham Hatt is included. Surprisingly, inside the box was a UK Tomy TrackMaster battery manual, which must have had an interesting trip coming from the UK to Japan and then from Japan to the US
And in my ongoing box revision research, I have now found a version of the 90s box Gordon with a slightly updated incompatibility list - sort of. I have now found Gordons as late as 1997 inside boxes printed in 1995, so I suspect they overprinted 1995 boxes and used them for about a year and a half or so afterwards. I say this because the other engines received an accessory incompatibility list update dated August 1996 around the begining of 1997, which it seems Gordon missed because the original short list exists on the early 2000s production runs in the 90s style boxes (my '99 box date 2000 engine date still has the short list). I'm sure this makes very little sense, I'll have to write something up about box revisions once I have some more in hand.
The 1997 produced Gordon on bottom has a small sticker adding to the list - the short turntable and the crossover switch. The earliest release of Gordon I have from a month after his introduction has a sticker of the barcode over the box, I heated the sticker up enough to peek under and it looked like the regular barcode was there, so what it is for is beyond me. Don't worry, I'm scanning that catalog as soon as I am home tomorrow.
The TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) of it is that it seems they used Gordon boxes printed in 1995 into 1997, which means he never received an updated box at the begining of 1997. A sticker was added in 1997 but dropped by 1999 (my next point of reference)
