I bought a set as a Christmas gift for my pre-school daughter. Good first impression, works fine, the app seems quite good (but the train is usable without it), the color "programming" works nicely and is quite funny to watch a train going on its own, stopping on stops, reversing track, etc. I'd like to have a slower speed (the train offers three speeds but even the slowest one is quite fast, IMHO), though. (And the guide states the train detects derailing and stops automatically, which it doesn't in our experience, it just goes on on the floor...)
Now, I'm thinking about reverse-engineering the BT communication and building my own app... :-)
My toddler loved this until we lost the train. Interoperability with common wood train rails is good except that the locomotive doesn’t have enough traction to go up any of the ascender pieces we have. Creative use of switches can reserve those for the other trains while the “Shinkansen” stays on flat track.
This is a clever idea. I assume part of the original idea here was "What if we could have the programming trains with signalling from Factorio and OpenTTD, but in the real world?"<p>It does sound pretty fun to have some kind of real world Factorio train network game...