BRIO’s manufacturing quality has historically been pretty high (including after production moved to China), so it’s always noteworthy when products fall a bit short. Take, for example, these large double curve tracks from the late 1990’s:

As you can see the male connectors were drilled off center. This, of course, prevents a proper fit.

I have five pieces of EE track with this issue. They all came from the #33172 Raceway Set which includes a dozen pieces of EE, so they were probably part of the same production run.

Double track was never very popular. It was expensive for what you got and relatively inflexible in a layout unless you had a lot of it. The Raceway Set was one way for BRIO to clear out its excess stock of unsold track, which also made it a cost effective way of getting it if that’s what you wanted. Unless, of course, something like this popped up!

The BRIO #33214 Freight Battery Engine is an impressive puller for it’s size, but it has its limits. A single AA battery plus one set of drive wheels will only get you so far, as you can see in the video below.

So why get two of them?

The answer is because they have magnets in both the front and back, which means you can do the same thing “real” trains do when they need more power: add engines. With two Freight Battery Engines working together, you can pull an impressively large load.

And, if you want a longer train, you can always add a third. Very few of BRIO’s battery engines allow chaining like this (for example, the #33249 Rechargeable Engine 8WD).

You could always, of course, put one in front and have a second in back, going in reverse to “push”, but on longer trains that is more likely to cause a derailment. Plus, two of these engines together looks really nice.

My BRIO #33883 Airport with Control Tower arrived last week and I am quite happy with it. The first thing you notice when you unbox it is its size: it’s huge!

As you can see from the photo, the airport base has a D-size track molded on one side. The entire base is a little larger than DxD, so this beauty requires quite a bit of space. Much more than the original airport from 2013. The S-shape to the canopy gives it a very modern look, and the flooring is a molded tile pattern which is a nice touch. Also interesting is the luggage slide, an elevator for getting bags to the top, and a loading zone for vehicles. The top of the control tower is removable, and is identical to the one found in the original set which means you can also remove the roof to place a figure inside. The best features, though, are the airplane in red, and a large locator light that glows for several seconds when you tap it.

It’s a winner. It’s expensive, but you are getting a seriously large accessory for your money and the attention to detail is appreciated. It’s a better design, IMHO, than the older airport and monorail combo and worth the money.

Anyone who has collected BRIO for any length of time is familiar with the #33532 Car Wash set. Listed in catalogs from 1986 through 1990, it had two foam rollers that are notorious for disintegrating as they age. It is almost impossible to find a set with the foam rollers intact. Most have large chunks missing from them, with small pieces of foam that flake off at the slightest touch. The foam apparently dried out over time, and the rollers crumbled as a result. I’ve even seen a set in an unopened box where the rollers had complete come apart, leaving only piles of blue dust inside.

But every now and then you get lucky. I found this one recently, and to my amazement the foam rollers are almost completely intact:

This photo is as bad as I could make it look. There are some depressions in the foam, but very little is missing and the rollers still look cylindrical. This is the most complete I’ve even seen them in over 15 years of looking.

Back in January of 2015, BRIO AB was acquired by The Ravensburger Group (Ravensburger is most widely known for its extensive line of jigsaw puzzles). At the time, BRIO did not have direct distribution in the United States, instead relying on Schylling Inc. to serve as a middleman. For those of us in the United States, there was nothing good about this arrangement: Schylling chose to import only part of BRIO’s product line, updated their catalog annually while BRIO was introducing new products in both the fall and spring, and lagged the European markets by a year or more.

When Ravensburger acquired BRIO I was hopeful that this all of this would change. Ravensburger has had U.S. offices for decades, and could serve as the direct distributor for the BRIO line of toys. Sure enough, this appears to be what has happened: BRIO has been dropped from the 2016 Schylling catalogs, and U.S. retailers are seeing the current generation of BRIO Wooden Railway products. We still lag the European markets, but only by months instead of a full year.

I view this as a significant improvement. I’d rather see the U.S. get new products immediately, of course, but Schylling never was a very good middleman and I am happy to see them out of the picture.

BRIO released a lot of terriffic products over the past couple of years, but their U.S. distributer Schylling has not brought all of them into the U.S. market. Because BRIO had both a spring and fall line of Wooden Railway accessories and Schylling only updates their product lineup annually, it is possible that some of the 2014 products will come to the States in 2015, but there are no guarantees and there are still a number of products that were released in previous years that just weren’t picked up by Schylling and may never be.

Some of my favorites are listed below with links to searches on the U.S. sites for Amazon and eBay. Always check shipping charges, especially when dealing with eBay sellers, as some services and the Global Shipping Program especially can be very expensive.

Normally I only buy BRIO that’s in good condition or better, but there’s only so much you can expect from vintage toys and as a general rule the older it is the more compromises you are going to have to make. I think the same can be said about exceptionally rare items, too, even the ones that aren’t really that old. Case in point, I recently acquired this #33429 Blue Steam Engine:

Yeah, it’s in bad shape. The edges are tattered, some of those paint chips are really gouges in the wood, and even the sticker is worn. But here’s the thing: in the 14+ years I’ve been hunting for BRIO (off and on) I’ve seen exactly three of these engines, including this one. And none of them have been in what I’d consider to be good shape.

Sometimes condition just doesn’t matter. Sometimes you are lucky to find the thing at all.