ThomasNATION Reviews - Off the Rails (All Engines Go!)
September 19, 2026
If you were to ask any longtime fan of Thomas what their thoughts were on the 'Big World, Big Adventures' rebrand of the original television series as a whole, they would more often than not tell you that Nia was a fairly mid addition to the Steam Team. She felt like a character only included to fit a quota, and, to quote Unlucky Tug, "putting an obvious label on someone is pretty offensive". With that said, while Nia hasn't had the greatest track record in terms of her stories so far in All Engines Go!, I didn't think she's all that bad here. She became a character with legit depth, and I wanted to see more of her. As such, I was looking forward to seeing what else they could do with her character for this week's new episode which involves Nia getting a huge Earth ball from Whiff's Recycling Plant to Norramby Beach with the catch of all the rail lines being blocked...yay.
What was the end result, I hear you asking? Well, imagine if you took the story of 'Emily Saves the World' but you swap out the leading role and crank the insanity levels to the max and you pretty much have this episode in a nutshell. Also, I can't be the only one who thought of this but we've already seen Nia learn this exact same moral of changing your perfect plans to make sure deliveries are done on time three times already such as back in Season 1b with 'Nia's Perfect Plan', the 'Take a Beat' short from the All Aboard mini-series and recently with 'Fast Friends' which is from the exact same season as this episode.
I'm sorry if I'm a little hard on this one, but all that this episode did was just really make me wish that I was watching 'Emily Saves the World' again which even then was just a CGI Series version of 'Rusty and the Boulder' and that is why I have to give the All Engines Go version of 'Off the Rails' a rating of a 1.5/5.
Final Rating: 1.5/5
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