Citations › Citation ID: 11

C11. BOOK: Daniel Konstanski, The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks: The Inside Story of a Design Icon (Unbound, 2022), p. 48.

The LEGO Group ... knew that retiring 9V was going to hit the fans hard. ... Power Functions returned to battery boxes, which meant that all the new train track, while compatible with the previous version from a connector standpoint, would not need metal rails. This had the advantage of making track less expensive to produce, thereby lowering the bar of entry, but it meant that new track would be incompatible with 9V train motors that relied on electrified rails. Furthermore, the element managers, predecessors of today’s element coaches, working in collaboration with designers, had earmarked all of the train-specific elements for deletion. From now on, trains would have to utilise windows and doors shared by other product themes.

Almost all train-specific elements were also retired when 9V trains were replaced with Power Functions in the late 2000s.