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...
