I have to admit that, much like the RiD Dreadwind & Smokejumper set, I can't remember when I acquired Team Bullet Train - each sold separately in the west, despite being a boxed set in Japan - but I do know that I bought them all together, most likely from eBay and, if the metadata on my original photos is anything to go by, about ten years ago.
As far as I can recall, I wasn't even aware of them when I bought RiD Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Megatron and Galvatron... Possibly not even when I later acquired Scourge or the Car Brothers. In fact, pretty much all I can remember is that I thought they looked like crap when I first saw them... but my feelings toward them later changed dramatically and, while I really coveted the Takara version with its translucent plastic, I ended up 'settling' for Hasbro's version.
The concept - a set of three bullet trains that transform into individual robots and also combine into a single, larger robot - seemed somehow almost stereotypically Japanese (rightly or wrongly, I see Japan as being a little obsessed with trains, not least because of the Densha de GO! arcade games which involve nothing more than the seemingly mundane and routine task of driving a passenger train on a set route, yet have been adapted to home consoles from the original PlayStation to the Nintendo Switch) and, while my appreciation of the RiD/CR line is still a little variable (too many Matchbox-style 'Go-Bots', G1 repaints and Beast Wars cast-offs for my liking), Team Bullet Train/Rail Racer is now among my favourite TransFormers toys.
Let's take a look and try to figure out why...
I'm no afficionado of trains, so I had to look up that Midnight Express has disguised himself as an E4 series Shinkansen (which probably accounts for his Japanese designation of J-Four). It has a curiously duck-billed front end, leading into a very squared-off mid- and rear section, but the thing that really blew me away about this train is that it's double-decker - something quite common in Japan, across Europe and in the USA... but curiously rare in the UK, due to some peculiarity of our rail network, and utterly absent here since the 1970s. Having seen only a handful of episodes of the TV show (on a DVD bought by a friend, from a charity shop), I've no idea how the idea of three robots disguised as track-based locomotives was made to appear remotely useful... I am somewhat curious to find out, albeit not sufficiently curious to actually buy the series on DVD, particularly given the wonky way it was collected (and not collected) in that format.
Midnight Express makes for a fairly basic model train, with only a few seams on the roof and in the middle. I'd imagine that's essentially true to life, since the whole raison d'être for bullet trains is to be as sleek as possible in service of achieving the highest speeds possible. The midsection seams are rather awkward as they don't line up with the sculpted windows, leading to four on each side being split. On balance, though, this probably has less impact than the nine screw holes on the righthand side. It appears that the train has been artificially extended versus the real-life vehicle in the middle - by precisely the length of one additional window on each side - with much the same additional length on the rear section to balance the two halves and allow for the fairly authentic 'MAX' (Multi-Amenity Express, apparently) branding on each side, embellished with the addition of the name 'Cybertron' just below. Due to the vagaries of plastic tolerance and a lack of dedicated clips, the back end of mine never sits quite flush with the midsection, but I'd say Midnight Express is still one of the better constructed members of the team as far as his vehicle mode is concerned... Though admittedly that's partly down to his sheer simplicity by comparison.
The paint job is based on the original 'yellow stripe' livery which would have been accurate at the time this toy was produced. It has a gorgeous, sparkly blue paint along the bottom of the train, the yellow stripe, and bare white for the upper part of the train. The blue paint is a little untidy and feathered in places, and quite thinly applied to what becomes Midnight Express's crotch flap in robot mode, but the strangest part is that the yellow paint is applied on top of the metallic blue on the nose, but directly onto the white plastic everywhere else. The roof features a couple of yellow stripes toward the rear, on sections of panel lining that appear to represent areas of bare metal on the real train, suggesting that some paint - ideally silver, perhaps - should have carried on over similiarly sculpted linework across the midsection and on the front. There's a massive Autobot insignia on the area of roof between the first set of windows and the frontmost pair of doors on each side, just in front of where the unpainted sections of roof detail end.
Based on information available on TFWiki, it appears that mine is one of the later issuings of this mold as, while the headlights and front windscreen are painted grey, the windows along the sides are all painted with a metallic cyan. While I really would have preferred translucent plastic for the windows, I have to admit that some aspects of this mold would likely not work that well with a type of plastic that is known to be fragile.
One feature I quite like is that the train's wheels are not only free-rolling, but they're set in separate sections on the underside, molded in grey plastic so that they stand out below the blue underside of the train. The fact that these sets of wheels are so widely spaced is what really clued me in to the artificially increased length of this toy's train mode. At about 23.5cm/9.3" in length (not including the removable hitch at the back end) Midnight Express is the longest of the three trains, but it ends up looking too long. Given the probable weight of something like this, I'd expect it to start sagging in the middle, particularly once it takes on passengers, because there's literally no support there.
Another cool feature is the somewhat tidy storage of his weapon accessories. I say 'somewhat tidy', because the spring-loaded launcher section pegs into the inside of the roof at the rear, while the barrel section (and missile) slip into a hole through the robot's folded-in foot and into the core of its left leg. The former works very well, but one has to be very cautious in removing the latter, as the missile can get stuck inside. It's not that hard to remove in vehicle mode, just feels like a bit of a design flaw, particularly as it becomes completely inaccessible once the legs are extended during transformation.
Each of the members of Team bullet Train ends up with a hitch at the back and a corresponding hole on the underside of their nose, so they can be strung together into a three-part train, and any of them can take any position. What's more, each hitch has its own hole, so the rearmost train can be attached facing backwards, for their return journey.
Robot Mode:
I should probably make it clear straight away that there's a strong likelihood of 'Leg Day' jokes with the write-ups for this trio. Their individual proportions are all out of whack in service of the gestalt and, since Midnight Express is everything from the waist down, it's particularly apparent here. What I find baffling, though, is why the knee has been placed so high, when only a couple of small changes to the lower legs could have allowed them to be placed lower, thus improving the proportions of the legs for both Midnight Express and the Rail Racer gestalt. Ridiculously short thighs still occur from time to time, and still look ridiculous... but here, coupled with the overall size of the legs versus the torso, Midnight Express looks like a much smaller 'bot wearing two almost complete vehicles as boots... Kind of like building a Combiner Wars gestalt using limb-bots for the legs, but the basic torso robot's own head and arms.
The torso is essentially just a bold T-shape, with the extended pelvis covered over by a flap-down sporran of train shell, while the comparatively tiny, slim arms have shoulder pads the likes of which I haven't seen since the 1980s. While I've angled them upwards in my photos, it appears that they're intended to be angled down, becoming almost cloak-like. I guess they're supposed to be shoulder-mounted shields, but I personally just don't like the way they obscure the arms and seem to limit their movement. These limits are an illusion, of course, since the shoulder itself is a ball joint and the panels are hinged at the outer corner of the upper arm. Since the elbow only bends to 90° (unless one chooses to unpeg the transformation joint at the elbow, allowing for something close to a full curl, thanks to the way the arms stow in vehicle mode), and there's no bicep swivel, the panels never actually interfere with the natural movement of the elbows, they just look as if they do.
Sculpted detail is perhaps a little simplistic... The chest is made up of the central section of the train but, due to the placement of the windows, he doesn't quite get the iconic, Optimus Prime-style window pecs - they're offset toward the left, and he has a sliver of window coming in to the right side of his chest. With the robo-sporran deployed, a nicely painted belly section, with the upper section of the abs painted yellow, and framed with both grey and blue. The sporran itself, bizarrely, is completely unpainted on the newly outward-facing side, despite having raised details vaguely resembling the Autobot insignia over a fluted background. The arms feature very piston-like bicep details, but are otherwise quite plain apart from raised panels, and three deep and ugly pits in the fronts of the forearms. The legs are a bit more varied, with the thighs molded largely in grey plastic featuring clearly defined armour and ventilation panels, while the enormous shins are symmetrical only from the raised knee guards to about two-thirds of the way down to the feet. The final third - and the feet themselves - feature unique designs to match the asymmetrical feet. The knee guards are covered with a black paint with a metallic blue shimmer, while much of the shin is covered with a continuation of the blue paint from the bottom of the train. The raised square sections have (somewhat feathered) yellow-painted frames. Due to their construction, his left foot - made up of the rear of the train - has a substantially longer heel spur than the right.
The two parts of his weapon plug together to form a hand-held, spring-loaded missile launcher with a very long barrel, the hitch becoming a sight laying part-way down the barrel. While it works quite well, there's a small design flaw: the trigger for the spring-loaded launch mechanism ends up on the underside. This means that it actually looks like a trigger, albeit one sitting just out of the reach of the robot's fist, but it makes it that much less convenient for human hands to fire the weapon... though I guess one could argue that just makes it a safety feature. While it's not painted, it's made up of three different plastic colours, so it ends up looking pretty good on balance.
The head sculpt is probably the best part of his individual robot mode, since the 'helmet' somewhat resembles the front of the train - windscreen and all - except for its paintwork: the whole helmet is metallic blue. It's sleekly designed, longer than it is wide or tall, with on-brand yellow stripes curving back on each side. The face features a somewhat cocky, smiling expression, with fluting in the cheeks and bold, neon pink eyes. It's also very expressive thanks to the way it's attached to the body via a hinge at the very back of the head, which leads to a ball joint at the base of the neck.
Midnight Express's transformation is pretty simple, but also rather precise in places, and some of the joints are surprisingly tight for part of their range. Because the train is asymmetrical from front to back, the legs have to rotate not only in one specific direction, but care must be taken to rotate the leg 90° backwards, then back into alignment (effectively like swinging the leg 90° out to the 'side') at the hip rather than simply rotating at the knee, because the legs can only collapse in one particular orientation. The amount of twisting and turning for the feet alone is probably more complicated than a lot of contemporary TransFormers toys, while the arms are just a little fussy, with the yellow sections clipping quite firmly into their robot mode positions, and clearance for returning them to their vehicle mode configurations being hindered by the sides of the shoulder armour panels. The spring-loaded section of the weapon has to be plugged in facing toward the body as, while there's a slot cut into the back of the left leg to accommodate the trigger, the robot's elbow butts up against the back of the gun if it's inserted the other way round. By comparison, the head reveal is both simple and elegant - the central section of the train's roof simply flips round, and the head can then be lifted up and back via the two neck joints.
In spite of his bonkers propotions, Midnight Express is very well articulated for an early 2000s TransFormers toy. However, posing is complicated mainly by the small number of ratchets in his hips (just four in 90° of travel) and the lack of useful articulation of the feet - the left foot can rotate freely, with the 'heel' and 'toe' sections each able to angle downward, while the right foot is effectively immobile apart from its heel spur, which can make use of both of its transformation joints - a hinge and a fairly loose ball joint - to improve stability. The knees both offer 90° of bend and have an unrestricted (and surprisingly loose) rotation joint just above, but the short thigh means they never really look as if they move very far, despite their range of forward-backward swing only being impaired by the shoulder armour panels. Move them out of the way (or swing the leg out to the side via its ratchets), and the hips can rotate a full 360°! The shoulders are ball-jointed, with the armour panels and elbows both being pinned hinges, and there's no wrist articulation. As mentioned above, the head has excellent range due to its two transformation joints - 90° on the hinge alone, with unrestricted rotation and a good range of tilt via the ball joint at the base of the neck.
I have to admit that, while playing about with Midnight Express for the purpose of taking photos, and again while working on this post, I found that he's actually a lot more fun - even in and of himself - than many newer TransFormers toys have been. He's by no means a great toy on his own: his weird porportions are very off-putting and he's clearly been designed to be the bottom half of a gestalt more than his own robot, but he is unique in style, appearance and concept, which counts for a lot considering the homogenised transformations seen throughout Combiner Wars.
Given the many faults of this toy, I'd be delighted to see a contemporary remake of Team Bullet Train, whether official or Third Party, because the concept - while undoubtedly niche - has a lot of potential.
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