I always preferred chuggington over Thomas, and this is coming from someone who had an entire 5-gallon bucket of wooden railway, a healthy collection of diecast toys, (And these were from when diecast toys used magnetic couplers, not the hook-and-ring they use now) and who wouldn't go to bed unless I had my diecast Murdoch with me. There were a few reasons for this, the first being the more cartoonish nature of the show, slotting somewhere between Classic Thomas and Friends and the awfulness known as All Engines Go. The second reason though, was that I could connect with the characters a lot more, especially Wilson, who was basically the locomotive version of me, not to mention that Hoot had red-green color blindness. Looking back, a lot of the Thomas characters had very surface-level personalities, and they fit a lot of gender roles, not to mention things like Henry having as much or as little power as the plot required. Chuggington however, I feel gave their characters much deeper personalities. Take Calley for example, in the earlier seasons when she was the sole rescue "chugger", she's kind, caring, and always happy to help, but won't avoid reprimanding other chuggers if they've done something dumb. However, when she gets added to Chug Patrol, she sometimes feels that she has no place on the Chug Patrol team because everyone else on Chug Patrol has their own talents, which can lead to her to try too hard to impress others. However, after her lack of confidence in herself led to a major embarrassment to Chug Patrol, Calley earned the job of a first responder, virtually fixing the problem. I have a very hard time believing that something like that could ever happen in Thomas and Friends.