Robots in Disguise Railspike

Every TransFormers team needs a leader, and for Team Bullet Train, that's Railspike. This role also makes him the uppermost section of the Rail Racer gestalt and, considering how Midnight Express handled being the legs, one would have to become concerned about how so similar a cylindrical vehicle could handle being both an individual robot and the upper chest, arms and head of a combiner.

It's probably not a good sign that neither Hasbro nor Takara Tomy ever repainted this mold, or used the same template with alternate vehicles... But let's see how Railspike works out on his own merits...

Vehicle Mode:
So, Trainy McTrainface III is disguised as a 500 Series Shinkansen (which, as with the other two, informed the Japanese designation of J-Five), possibly the closest of the three to what I, personally, imagine when someone mentions 'bullet trains'. Of the three, he has the most curved sides - though he's nowhere near the real-life train's almost circular cross-section - and the most aircraft-like nose, including the shallow dome of the cockpit. Surprisingly, though, the nose is somewhat truncated and less finely-pointed compared to the real-life train the toy is based upon. Most of the body is naturally quite smooth, but the lower edge is broken up into smaller panels, some featuring vents, and there's the characteristic bulge in the skirt around the frontmost set of wheels.

On the subject of his wheels, there are two odd features here. First and foremost, where the other two members of Team Bullet Train have wheels and their mountings molded in the same colour of plastic (all grey for Midnight Express, all black for Rapid Run), Railspike's wheels are all molded in white plastic, but the rear mountings are blue and the front mountings are white... all the more strange when you take a look at his arms in robot mode, and find sculpted wheel-mounting details on a panel of blue plastic which is concealed in vehicle mode. Secondly, due to the tapering nose, his front wheels are set closer together than the rear wheels... which just wouldn't work for a vehicle which runs on consistently-spaced tracks. Obviously, this is just a toy, and no tracks were ever produced for JRX, let alone the Hasbro version, so it doesn't really matter... Nevertheless, it would have been easy enough to mount his front wheels differently to fix this and improve the colour consistency issue.

 

The mystery of the windows continues with this model, as the real life train seems to have 13 windows running down the sides, where Railspike has only 11. Furthermore, one of these windows is unpainted for no clear reason, considering other windows which are similarly broken between two chunks of plastic have been painted. The alignment between some of these panels is pretty questionable on mine, with the window frames and the black stripe appearing to also be at a different angle on the second window (counting from the front) on each side. The passenger and crew doors are sculpted in on both sides, though the latter is somewhat fudged due to its proximity to a transformation hinge, and the large panel of blue structural plastic further reduces the accuracy of the model. The back end of the train is shorther than it should be, closer to the passenger doors, with the robot's folded-down feet not quite filling out the full length.

While the middle third of the train is broken up by more transformation seams than any part of any of the other members of Team Bullet Train, probably the most obvious problem with Railspike is the massive seam between the mid- and rear sections. Whether it's because the legs don't fully compress or just that there's no clip between these sections, the back end has a tendency to sag, exacerbating what is already the widest seam on the figure. Bad enough that the cuts between sections are at a strange angle, they don't even appear to be precisely the same angle due to the sagging, which comes as a result of the lack of any support for the robot's hip joints.

Paintwork is a little disappointing, generally. As well as the black and blue stripes being slightly misaligned due to the myriad interconnected panels making up the sides of the train, both are also quite feathered in places, and bare white plastic visible in some of the window frames. Worse still, the black paint in particular seems prone to scratching or scuffing, especially around some of the joints. The windows themselves are a similar metallic cyan to Midnight Express, and these look pretty good. The metallic blue used for the stripe running the full length of the roof and to the tip of the nose looks a little washed out, particularly where it meets the blue plastic, and mine has white edges visible on several seams as well as some minor feathering. The black paint in front of the cockpit is seriously feathered, and the headlights here are bare white plastic, where they were painted on the other two. The cockpit canopy is translucent teal plastic over a base of blue plastic, and the canopy's asymmetrical frame has been painted over with a very weak grey, which ends up looking translucent itself. It's difficult to tell from photos but it looks as though the paintwork on and around the canopy should have been either solid black, or a dark, gunmetal grey.

 

Like the other two, Railspike also features an adaptation of the real-life train's JR500 logo on the righthand side of the nose, but the conflated 'JR' is absent, and the words 'West Japan' below are replaced with 'Cybertron'. This makes a kind of sense, but looks strange considering both Midnight Express and Rapid Run have more faithfully reproduced livery. He also has a strangely obtrusive Autobot insignia - slapped on the left side of the nose, where the other to display theirs on the roof. This was probably a practical decision, since all but about an inch of Railspike's roof has to be able to split in half.

Railspike's weapon stashes in vehicle mode in a similar way to Rapid Run's missile - there's a channel in the underside with a tab (and, strangely, a slot) protruding from either leg for slots on the barrel of the gun. The barrel is hinged at the base so that it can fold up the back of the train, in front of Railspike's folded-down feet, and then the hitch swings back from below. The Hasbro version had its barrel artificially extended, to the point where it could not fit into the channel using the intended (second pair of) slots. The frontmost set fit, but that leaves a large gap between the back of the train and the unit carrying its hitch. This works well enough, but it's quite ugly, so I ended up taking a scalpel and trimming the block from the end so that the battery compartment fits more snugly against his feet.

Robot Mode:

Are we done with Leg Day yet? Should I switch my attention to the enormous, almost wing-like shoulder shells and the cavernous spaces left within them by the shifted positions of the robot's arms and the gestalt's head? Because, let's face it, in a team of goofy-looking robots, Railspike is clearly the goofiest. He has roughly the same absurd leg-to-everything-else ratio of Rapid Run and the same gloriously 80s shoulder paddage as Midnight Express, along with the same tiny, skinny arms and clown feet as both. His own unique styling, though, is achieved by movement-restricting hip skirts and tails... and the gestalt's head just kind of chilling out on his chest.

Yet, in spite of all this, I'd have to say that the base robot is probably the best proportioned of the three - take the train's nose shell off his shoulders and remove Rail Racer's head (or even just sink it deeper into his chest) and, yes, he'd still looks stupidly lanky, but it'd kind of work. Of course, viewed from the side, he'd still look ridiculous because his lower legs are about four times deeper than they are wide, so it looks like he's wearing boots made out of the boxes from flat-packed furniture.

Railspike has also drawn the short straw in terms of sculpted detail. The outer faces of his lower legs and his thighs feature a miscellany of vague, shallow-sculpted tech detailing, and the shoulder shells feature some panel lining and fairly random raised details - winning points from me by being at least a little bit asymmetrical. The forearms are made up of a collection of overlapping armour panels, with some manner of vent-like detail leading to the cuffs on three of the four faces. There's some asymmetrical fluting on the chest, but most of it is concealed by Rail Racer's head, and the four large screws at the top of the chest take one's attention away from what little is visible on either side. What's really strange is that there's some perfunctory detailing on the inner faces of his hip skirts, which is almost never visible unless special effort is made to lift it into view.

Paintwork is similarly quite dull - there's certainly a lot of metallic blue, which has been used to thoroughly coat the insides of the shoulder shells, but the application is quite feathered and thin-looking in several places on mine. There's literally nothing else that's unique to robot mode, though. Every other visible paint application is from vehicle mode, so he ends up looking plainer than Rapid Run, whose base colour is grey. It almost makes me wonder if Hasbro thought the red LED would add sufficient extra colour, or if so much of the toy's budget was spent on making that accessory, there just wasn't anything left for paint.

Something I find really fun - if a little strange - about the three members of Team Bullet Train is the vast differences in their weapons. Midnight Express has a spring-loaded launcher with a detachable barrel, Rapid Run has a combination shield/spring-loaded launcher... and Railspike has a battery-operated LED intended to illuminate the translucent turquoise gun barrel... or is it a laser sword? Because the grip can be folded out parallel to the barrel as well as perpendicular to it. Where the other two figures' bios make clear reference to their accessories, the descriptions for both J-Five and Railspike don't really seem to mention his hand-held weapon at all... In fact, reading the three characters' bios together almost makes it look as if this Railspike's weapon should be wielded by Midnight Express, since that one mentions his "light swords" (though, confusingly, the Japanese version clarifies this by describing "blades of light from his shoulders [that can] slice icebergs in two"). Both Railspike and J-Five's bios mention rocket launchers in his shoulders, as well as something called a "sonic umbrella"... but I can't see the LED weapon as being something that fits that name. Additionally, while the red LED is very bright for its size, its light barely makes it halfway up the length of the barrel, possibly because of the five large notches taken out of each side (one pair being the slots of tabbing the weapon in between his legs in vehicle mode).

Railspike's head is probably my favourite of the three, since it fits his vehicle mode perfectly: the top of the helmet is basically a squashed-up version of the train's nose, albeit with a simplified paint job. Coupled with the curved, sweeping design of the sides and the chin guard, the overall look is befitting of a character who is fast-moving in both robot and vehicle mode. My main complaint is that the face is quite similar to that of Midnight Express, but its neutral expression means he lacks his team-mate's sense of personality. Plus, it's unpainted white plastic, which looks comparatively bland, even with large, neon pink eyes. It also seems strange that the blue paint on the lower part of the helmet stops so abruptly on the seam between the two plastic peices making up the head, rather than following the sculpted details. All that said, by far the daftest thing is that the back of Rail Racer's head sticks up in front of Railspike's head, obscuring his face almost up to eye level anyway.

Railspike's transformation makes for an interesting contrast to both Midnight Express and Rapid Run. The back end is much the same as the latter, just with the additional step of rotating the lower leg below the knee so that the feet - which hang off the roof at the back of the train - are pointing to what was the underside of the train, as well as connecting pegs between the lower legs so they hold together without the need for a separate section of roof. The pelvis then has to split right down the middle to accommodate repositioning Rail Racer's neck joints once the train's nose is split apart. Railspike's head pops up automatically, on a spring, as soon as Rail Racer's neck joints are moved out of the way, but it has to be rotated 180° as it only collapses into his body when facing backwards. The final step is swinging the arms down out of two halves of the nose, and rotating the forearms to expose the elbow joint. Most of it works very well but, as mentioned above, what it's really missing is some clips between the backs of the lower legs and the midsection of the train's roof. The whole back end of the train has a tendency to sag, and the hip joints are able to move quite freely as a result. Railspike makes for a decent train-shaped boomerang.

Given that the arrangement of his legs is not dissimilar to Rapid Run, it's quite surprising what a difference it makes to have a rotation joint under the knee. It doesn't even have to come into play for many dynamic poses, though, and even with his hip skirts, Railspike feels as if he's more easily able to move and stand dramatically, or pose mid-walk. While the skirts/tails hanging off his waist prevent his legs swinging backwards, the ball-jointed hips can swing more than 90° forward and, with the hip skirts swung out, a full 90° to the sides. His knees are somewhat contentious because, in their intended configuration for Railspike's individual robot mode, the range of the joints is limited to about 40° due to the tops of the calves being higher than the joints. This limitation could have been avoided if the rotation joint was closer to the ankle, but that would likely have caused problems for Rail Racer's hands, which are stored in Railspike's ankles. On the upside, despite the fact that the gestalt's elbow joints are in the middle of Railspike's thighs, they're solid enough they they don't bend without some effort in this form. The main problem with the hips is that they're a little loose, so getting him to stand in any kind of A-stance can be quite tricky, particularly since his slim heel spurs cannot fold down for additional support. The arms themselves are screwed into place inside the shoulder shells, and so only able to swing about 90° outward on their transformation joint, but the shell pieces are each able to rotate a full 360°. His elbows are double-ended ball joints, meaning they can be bent far enough that his forearms butt up against the 'floor' inside the train shell on his shoulders, as well as rotating due to transformation.

So, in and of himself, Railspike could be generously described as 'a mixed bag'... but perhaps more honestly as a bit rubbish. What with the wonky sculpted detail, inaccurate window count, truncated nose and rear, as well as the fuzzy paint job, I'd say Railspike probably has the least accurate vehicle mode of the set. So much of him is given over to becoming part of Rail Racer that his own robot mode is ugly and basic, and his individual poseability is compromised. His vehicle mode paint job isn't what I'd describe as extensive, yet he has no unique paintwork in robot mode, and is literally wearing the gestalt form's head on his chest. Probably his most interesting feature - apart from an excellent but poorly-decorated head - is the weapon, thanks to its battery-operated LED, but even that just seems incongruous compared to the spring-loaded weapons packaged with the other two members of Team Bullet Train, and how effectively electronic features were used in the few other RiD/CR toys (such as Ultra Magnus and Scourge) that had them.

Nevertheless, he's certainly not my least favourite of the team, and I think that with a few tweaks to his engineering and paintwork - or even some Reprolabels-style stickers - he could have been pretty good. In particular, since the train's nose really doesn't do much in either Railspike's individual robot mode or on Rail Racer, it feels as though its transformation could have been handled differently, giving Railspike more impressive, proportional arms and smaller 'wings'.