Crumbs

What on earth is this, thomas with machine guns?

I forget the name, but there is a Plarail model of such a train and it's not Thomas - I'm sure one of the Plarail experts will soon chip in and tell us

thats belle, one of the search and rescue engines. she was introduced the same time as flynn. those are water cannons for fighting fires.

http://ttte.wikia.com/wiki/Belle

thought it seemed rather incongruous

[Super]

Belle's water cannons also come in handy for crowd control at the ride along on Thomas sites.

The one you have pictured is the Trackmaster version. Ucwepn has a Plarail unboxing review where he compares the Trackmaster to the Plarail versions which are different.

That's the name, couldn't remember it for my life

Have to say the trackmaster one looks pretty rubbish with what looks to be static push rods...

Oh, I don't know. The Trackmaster one looks alright in my opinion, but I would happily have either,

The basic body shell looks fine to me but for some reason, static side rods put me off. That’s just my personal quirk though.

The activity on BPT is too high sometimes.. I was going to say who it was right when I saw the image and Sun beat me to it (I know 'every' character ever introduced in the TV series).

Blame Sharon Miller who designed her (Belle) with water cannons that use the same water used for her steam. Even Andrew Brenner or Sam Wilkinson didn't improve that. I never even thought about the crowd control idea (though Flynn would do it better than Belle, if anything). I've just remembered that in a short lived fan series called Ghost James, the deceased James replaced Belle's water with petrol and made her set Diesel on fire. Also, those events are called Day Out with Thomas.

The TrackMaster version has better proportions than the Plarail, but the only problem is the false coupling rods (some owners have cut them off and replaced them with normal ones. Dieselworks123 used Henry/Gordon/Hiro rods for his).