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Imported from Thailand by Brio, the Plan City Road System is beautifully made from top-quality materials and is a delight to handle. Impressively packaged and beautifully presented, the contents are far from disappointing. Each piece of the road track is easy for small fingers to handle and is made from high standard perfectly finished rubber wood. The road pieces are quite broad (approx 5 cm wide) with road markings allowing for the cars to pass each other with ease, just like a real road. The road system is a fabulous toy on its own, but there are several particularly ingenious things about it. Firstly, your child can use it to design and build a road, and buildings round it, by linking all Plan City items together however they want. Secondly, there is a railway crossing that links to a standard wooden Brio-type railway track (not provided). Also, the advantage of a road system, as opposed to a railway, is that any small toy car of about the right size could be used on it. There is no actual need to use other cars, however, as the three little fixed axle cars provided are excellent. These simple little push-along wooden cars are stylish and appealing in jolly red, yellow and green, but best of all they run like a dream, the wheels gliding the cars along the track with satisfying ease.
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This play set includes four long and three short straight pieces of road track; two long and one short ramp tracks; one intersection; one railway crossing track piece; two quarter straight tracks; 15 curved track pieces; four bridge supports; one road junction and a suspension bridge. The kit also comes with a few rather nice trees, traffic lights and a street light. We liked everything about this toy, but a couple of details were especially pleasing: the wood is preservative-free and comes from an environment-friendly source: replenishable rubber trees that are no longer able to produce latex. The joins for the track look like the traditional Brio wooden jigsaw joins, but are in fact made of a very strong, but slightly flexible, plastic material that is tough and forgiving and will undoubtedly lengthen the life of the product. This road system is very robust and would appeal to any child (the package says from age 3 and above) with an adult assisting. The instructions are clear and a simple plan of how it can be laid out is included. One word of caution: although the vehicles included in the road system are well made enough for correct use, they would probably dislike mistreatment, not coping as well as, say, metal toys, with being bashed around or trodden on. --Rebecca Pickering
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