thomas and friends mini series

I thought about this the other day, going through some of my duplicates, not only some of them have different names, but there are different numbers with same names. I would chalk it up to different assembly lines & factories putting different names under the engines and move on. If they were official name changes, I would probably consider them new items in the line, but when engines are identical with a different way to spell the name on the bottom, it might get out of hand pretty quickly and might discourage a lot of people who started collecting recently.

However, if someone is collecting a specific character only, it might help them if they really care about every single variation including numbers on the bottom.

I agree about the numbers on the bottom. I just assumed they were batch codes, so I never really thought much about them as I'm sure there any many out there. But the different names in the bottoms interests me. Even though it's the same train its cool to see that little difference. And your right...this may not appeal to most collector but maybe if someone has a favorite character they might want the different versions for their collection. It seems like the only ones with name differences are DC so far. So really not that big of a group of trains to collect if you want the different names. It's also just a fun thing to do if you have all the trains already and want to keep checking the shelves I'll keep compiling my list of what I've found and will be more than glad to share it with anyone that's interested.