Gaugemaster - GM2250101 - Cleaning Car, Motorized, Wet-Dry - Track Cleaning Car - DR 80303

Specific Item Information: The track cleaning vehicle supplys a small amount of cleaning fluid and then polishes the rails with the rotating pads.

Model Information: You might think trend-setting Shinkansen "bullet" trains represent the best-known Tomix products, or maybe the "Thomas the Tank Engine" series so popular worldwide with young and old, but you would be wrong.

The most widespread Tomix product is a utilitarian Track Cleaning Car. This freelanced car can use spinning abrasive disks or polishing pads (with a cleaning fluid reservoir) to clean the rails, as well as a vacuum to remove dust and small debris. It has been produced in many color schemes, and has been also sold in the U.S. under the Atlas brand. An HO scale version has been sold by Dapol in the United Kingdom. For a thorough account, see Doug Coster's Japanese Model Train Newsletter blog item: http://jmtn.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/tomixs-cleaning-sytems/

Road Name History: There is nothing that will get your rails cleaner than doing it by hand. However, doing it by hand is often impractical, especially when you've got tunnels. Next to cleaning your tack by hand, some products are available on the market to help you with this annoying job.

Manufacturer Information: Largely a Japanese manufacturer of children's toys and baby products, Takara Tomy has established a number of different subsidiary companies, with sales offices and factories located in various locations around the world. The firm is the product of a 2006 merger-of-equals between Tomy and Takara.

Takara Tomy produces N Scale model trains under their Tomytec division (we use the term loosely because it is actually a more complex relationship) using two different brand names "Tomytec" and "Tomix". Technically speaking these are not brands in the Western sense but rather they more closely resemble subsidiaries -of-subsidiaries, and where they fit in the corporate org chart may be the matter for a Master's thesis, but for our purposes we can think of them as simply two different brands with one manufacturer. In the past (prior to 1976) some model train products were branded simply "Tomy". To further confuse things, since 2000, outside of Japan, the company goes by the simple name, "Tomy" for their international subsidiaries.

If you consider both brand names as a single company, then the Tomytec/Tomix product line is the largest of its kind in Japan; with Kato following in second place (as of 2017). While Takara Tomy products are popular around the world, the firm's focus on children's toys has limited the international acceptance and distribution of its Tomytec model railroad products. Furthermore, unlike Kato, their focus tends to be heavily skewed towards Japanes prototypes.