Rolling stock from Jack Built Snap Trains and Skaneateles Handicrafters could ride on either manufacturer's tracks.

Another Swedish company that started producing a similar toy at about this time was Micki Leksaker in Gemla.

It apparently produced its first wooden train sets for a Swedish department store in 1956, thus predating Brio by a year or two.

In 1988[12] Micki started manufacturing products for IKEA and was the sole supplier of their wooden toy train line[13] for about ten years.

Seiffen made wooden figures and Christmas decorations and Blumenau (today a part of Olbernhau) created building blocks and construction sets.

Mass production techniques for polishing and coloring wooden toys were established and perfected in the Bohemian areas.

[18] In February 1999 two fires totally destroyed the old factory buildings in Egglham and consumed most of the company's archives and work models.

[19] Heros (He+ros), the company of Hermann Rossberg of Lam in the Bavarian Forest near to the border of Bohemia, influenced train design in the Blumenau tradition.

John W. Lee founded the American company "Learning Curve Toys" in November 1992 with a wooden railway system called "Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends Wooden Railway" based on the characters from the British children's television series Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends.

The line was also rebranded as "Thomas & Friends Wood" from 2017 to 2021, but reverted to the original "Wooden Railway" branding in 2022 following poor reception and sales.

With the popularity of the toy system rising due to the success of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, new markets outside of the traditional groups and countries were opened.

A recent sub-genre has emerged based on real-life prototypes of subway and commuter rail rolling stock.

They have recently expanded to commuter rail line rolling stock for New Jersey, Metro North, LIRR, and Philadelphia.

Although the original push-along trains made mostly of wood still resemble the core idea of this system toy and as of 2006 form the base of all the involved companies' production lines, electronics have gained access to the wooden world.

As with other toys, many wooden trains and track have been manufactured in China and other Asian countries in the twenty-first century.

Starting with traditional rather plain and abstract designs, Maxim sold products under the name "Tumble Tree Wood" for retail stores.

A producer that has sold its products under very many brands including its own name is Mentari Massen, with its main factory founded in 1988 in Surabaya, Indonesia.

In 2007 they re-launched their railway range under the brand Bigjigs Rail, in new blue sky and green hills packaging.

Complex track building systems made as parametric models allow anyone to create the exact length or angle he misses on the market.

Most modern track systems have a somewhat sophisticated profile with varying degrees of slanted sides for the grooves or rounded edges.

[30] This is due to the so-called "vario system" which allows some play when joining the tracks, so that with some wiggling around one can make layouts line up perfectly with no danger of derailing trains which do not use the exact geometry of the pieces.

Sometimes the round part of the hole is not an exact circle but rather an ellipse, allowing the tracks to connect with a small gap between them.

This length is useful for figures such as an eight with the crossing at right angles, a simple L-figure, a bulge to one side or a spectacles or Mickey Mouse head, to name the simplest.

The simplest way to add roads to this existing solution is to provide a layout printed on a paper or plastic sheet or even a carpet that uses the dimensions of the wooden tracks.

The normal early trains had engines and wagons each carved from a single piece of wood and connected by hooks and eyes.

Engines carved from a single block were commonly painted black in Europe with bright red funnels and wheels.

Wooden railway layouts based on the wTrak module standard have become part of model railroad shows in the United States - starting in the Pacific Northwest in 2009.

Early buildings had windows and doors made by drawing lines in a single color on simple rectangular blocks.

A common early station design consisted of a simple platform with a roof on two or three supports along the longer axis.

Learning Curve may have made this approach popular with many designs based on the story plots of the Thomas the Tank Engine series, such as a grain loader accessory[33] or a logging mill.