Thomas the train Cake

I have offered pretty much every close friend of mine to make the cake for her/his kid's birthday. Some have taken the offer and some have refused it for their own reason. When they do take my offer, I have three questions for them. How many people does it need to feed, what should be the flavor of the cake and what is the theme?
They usually go with what their child likes the most. This time, I offered to make the cake for a friend's son's birthday. When I asked him what he wants, he said 'Car Cake'. I had made a car cake for him last year. You can see the details here.

When I told him that he had a car cake last year, why not choose another kind of cake, he said "But I like Cars." and left the room. His mother convinced him to go with 'Thomas the train cake' since he likes Thomas the train show.

So, when I decided on the design, I sort of combined both and let the boy have couple of trucks with a road on the cake too. A win win situation for all.
It is a two vanilla flavored 13 X 9 cakes put side by side, torted and filled with strawberry buttercream and frosted with buttercream. You can check out different frostings in this post.

Mountain is made out of rice crispy treat (homemade and vegan) and so are the ramps for the trucks. The Rail road crossing sign is foam sheet (I did not have the time to let fondant dry. Bad planning) and the white and red striped railroad gate (or bar whatever it is) is the lollipop stick painted with red color. Gravel on the railway track is Heathbar toffee bites and sand is brown sugar.

If anyone is interested in the details of how to make all the components of this cake, send me an email and I will try to explain it. All these pictures were taken in cloudy weather.

Have a great weekend.