Bachmann Sidney and Mainland Diesel Thread

[TrainFan97]

I've been asking for Sidney for about a decade, and HO Scale Paxton was announced back in 2017. Only now do we finally have Sidney on the cards. 7 1/2 years after Paxton was first announced for HO Scale. I still can't believe it took this long. I thought HO Scale would never get Sidney, and that he was going to be in N Scale first. Well, better late than never. We all certainly hope Sidney's eye mechanism will be fixed, which unfortunately botched Paxton's HO Scale model, but was corrected on his Large Scale model. Hope they can do the same for HO Scale with the upcoming Sidney model. Not many have even bothered to make customs of Sidney, most likely because he never had a TrackMaster model to source a face from.

Mainland Diesel was a weird niche pick, but still welcome to me. This is also the first official piece of merchandise for these background characters, but only one was announced, and that begs the question: Will there be more variants with different faces? One of them is Ulli; the only one to actually have a name. There's also the Brazilian Class 08, Fernando, who would also share the same tooling, and his face is on one of the Mainland Diesels, as well as an Indian one. Bachmann still has Grumpy Diesel, in addition to the original one with the friendly face, but with the Mainland Diesels having different faces, it would actually make sense to own more than one. The only thing holding Bachmann back from making Splatter and Dodge is the CGI mandate.

On the topic of niche recolors, Green Salty would be possible, but it's taking indefinitely long to bring Salty himself back.