I have some issues which I need to speak out aloud. I have done it before on some forums and other sites little by little, but I've never made a large post about it and I want to just say everything at once where a partly public audience can see or choose to ignore it, because I'll feel bad if I keep posting it on comment sections and sound like I'm being a jerk, so I'm trying to control it and just type it all out calmly, because for years this has sometimes grinded my gears. I have tried ignoring it but it keeps coming back. It's nothing to do with the changes this year though, it's to do with names of the ranges given by a large amount of fans.
Tomy is just the name of the company which "makes" the ranges. It is not the names of any ranges and does not only do Thomas and Friends or train systems. The Thomas range made by Tomy is called Thomas Motor Road and Rail, which I rarely hear being called. I think it's to do with no logo in the US, but it is written as text on the boxes, and in the UK an actual logo appears on boxes. The name of the range before Thomas Motor Road and Rail was Tomica World. I don't understand why this keeps happening, I mean people don't seem to have problems with TrackMaster or other ranges. You didn't call your Wooden Railway or Take Along things your Learning Curves, or your TrackMaster things your Fisher-Prices. To add to that, Tomy made the Thomas Wooden Railway range for two years and no one was confused by that. People just seem to incorrectly refer to MRR as the Tomy range, and everything else gets their names as Wooden Railway or wind-ups. Even when refering to Plarail people still keep calling it "Tomy Plarail" or that act as Tomy and Plarail being two seperate things. I mean doesn't that seem a bit fishy to you when you realise the inconsistency in there? Plus the term "Tomy/TrackMaster" is incorrect as the former is the company and the latter is a product range. The thing which really adds to this is that Tomy made TrackMaster in the UK in 2008-9 so why hasn't anyone realised? Plus all over the internet I see fans who, when naming all the ranges at once, always never call it the same names as another user does and interjects the companies into it, so not even the fanbase is on the same page.
The next thing is that TrackMaster is spelt with a capital M, so it's not Trackmaster. I know that the logo makes it hard to tell but there have been several typings of it on product boxes, instruction manuals, and official websites, shouldn't it have been noticed already? Everytime I see spellings of Trackmaster I think it just looks like a misspelling.
I have tried to make it clear to others by editing the Thomas Wikia and renaming the articles accordingly, and this name problem is just precisely one of the important reasons as to why I joined this wikia, but still not enough people have noticed what is wrong. In fact, when I started looking the Thomas parts of the internet many years ago I was actually abducted into calling the ranges by the wrong name before I realized my mistake. I just don't understand how there are so many fans and collectors out there who are heavily into the ranges but they don't even know their own names. I don't mean to offend anyone, and you may just ignore this post, but I just want it to say everything with all my thoughts so it's out there somewhere.