As you have probably gathered by now, Little Man is a trainaholic! As he gets older he has become quite interested in how trains work, and especially how they run on tracks. He loves signals, points, buffers and turntables as much as he likes trains, however these are not as easy to buy for him in toy form as actual trains! When he started at big school he came out all excited because the wooden train set had buffers and apparently we had to get some for his set at home....

After looking on ebay I found that the brio buffers were going for silly money, which I would have paid had I not found any. Luckily near Little Man's school there is an independent department store which I didn't even know existed which had a huge toy department which included a range of wooden trains called Bigjigs. I had never even heard of them, but they had a fantastic range of Brio compatible wooden trains, tracks and accessories for about half the price. Among them was a set of 6 wooden buffers for a Bargain £2.99!

In the pack you get 6 wooden buffers which are just over 4 centimetres long, and are painted with red and white warning stripes so you trains know they need to stop. You get 3 each of male and female attachments - that is 3 with a hole and three with the rounded attachment that fit into the hole, so that you can put buffers at either end of your track. They are chunky L shaped buffers, and are well put together. They have survived 6 months of rough handling from Little Man, including being thrown and having various trains rammed into them at speed without suffering so much as a scratch to the paintwork. He absolutely loves these, often having several branches of track ending in a buffer as he cannot bear to see an unended piece of track - this means we can move on from circles and ovals!

I am really pleased with these buffers - I was a bit concerned that for £2.99 they would not be as good quality as some of the named brands, but this is definitely not the case. We have since added several Bigjigs train accessories to our collection and I honestly couldn't tell you which piece is from which brand. Wooden trains can be so expensive, and I would really recommend this range to extend your collection without blowing the budget - Santa has a few bits from Bigjigs in his sleigh this year! They are fully compatible with all other brands of wooden tracks and trains including Brio, Thomas, Universe of Imagination and ELC. We got ours from Johns Sanders of Ruislip but you can find them at various online retailers including Amazon Marketplace