Futuristic / Monorail style trains ??

[Super]

We have one of those Tagamoto sets and they are quite neat and small. So I guess they would fit with the Advance sets but might still be a bit large for them scale wise. Scale wise they may be closer to the regular Tomy gauge. We got ours from Target about 3 years ago and I remember they had a large display and also sold individual cars and add ons. However a lot of our parts got lost due to the size of all the accessories. The picture shows a Tagamoto car (2" long) next to the Matchbox/Hotwheels/Tomica size car. The Tagamoto vehicles take 2 LR-44 (AG-13) button batteries.

Those cars are fantastic!! I looked on Amazon this time and there is a starter set available for $7 if you have Prime.

That's the babies Super, I'm totally in love with the things, the downside is it looks like they may now be discontinued as the availability is a bit hit and miss, but on the plus side there are some great discounts to be had as Super Dude mentions. They have the individual cars discounted on Amazon.com to $4.99 each.

In case you're wondering Super the set you must have purchased was the 'Enforcer' set which is/was the largest set in the range and has two cars including the exclusive police car which is not available separately or in any other set at the moment.

On the plus side all the sets are compatible and can therefore expand your layout as much as you like, there are no restrictions on how many cars you have running simultaneously or any issues over voltages dropping over distance because as you mention the cars are self contained and powered by button cells

Personally I've managed to get one of each set (as each set has exclusive cars) and a handful of separate cars, my hope is to get an entire set before they disappear if they are discontinued...

[Super]

You are correct Nigels, that is the set we have. This video will show the set in action including the good and the bad of these little cars. They are temperamental in staying in their lane. There is quite a few offerings on Ebay
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40...o&_sacat=0

Totally agree they do sometimes change lanes or even do a complete u-turn, but to a degree this adds to their appeal as they don't simply go round in circles like most car/track sets...

has anyone tried them and the stickers on standard plarail road tracks?

[Super]

Not sure using the stickers on Plarail/Trackmaster tracks would turn out well as there is nothing to keep the cars in a lane to pass over them. I did try to just run them on the Plarail/Trackmaster tracks in just run mode (see video) but the batteries are drained and I don't have any new ones on hand. I suspect they would run alright on the tracks but probably swerve all over the road.

I'll give it a go in the next day or so and report back to both questions, running on plarail tracks and using codes on those tracks

from the videos i saw, they dont seem to stay in their lanes well anyway. at least with the plarail track you can predict roughly where the car will be in the lane... corners usually means hugging the outside.

nigels, looking forward to seeing the results of your experiment

I wonder how accurate that video was anyway, my experience of the cars is that they do stay in lane far better than that video implies. Maybe its because mine are newer or something?

Test is planned for today or tomorrow, other tasks permitting