Percy and the Bandstand is the most annoying one because there is no way to avoid Edward and the breakdown cranes being onscreen alongside Nelson, Jack and Alfie. This is the one case where I'll have to just imagine that the production team had the budget for some extra props. We'll say that the Gauge 5 Edward and breakdown train were built in Season 10 since the Jack and the Pack miniseries came out the same year as Season 10 and Season 10 did feature the Gauge 5 Thomas in a few places.
Toby is in that same episode but he never interacts directly with The Pack. We can imagine that the episode was filmed to avoid them being onscreen together so that they didn't need a new Toby prop.
Mountain Marvel features Duke. There isn't a great way to get around this but I think having both a Gauge 1 and Gauge 3 prop of the Proteus statue and then using the Gauge 1 engine props in the scenes Duke appears in would have been cheaper than building a Gauge 3 Duke. That's therefore what we're going to pretend happened there. Since Season 12 is the last model season, we can use the excuse that they just wanted to bring back a lot of old props for one last time.
Finally, there's Emily's appearance at Crovan's Gate in Duncan and the Hot Air Balloon. Crovan's Gate never ended up being rebuilt in Gauge 3 anyway so we'll say that they used the Gauge 1 props here too.
With the exception of having Edward and the breakdown train in Gauge 5 from Season 10 onwards, I will be sticking within the limitations of what props were actually built when writing model era episodes from now on. I can't wait to start writing for the CGI era when none of this matters anymore. Peace out ✌
