I thought I had to share this with you!
This evening, I was browsing a bookstore. In the Antiques/Collectables section, I came across a book called “Boys’ Toys”. It was a hardcover book about the size of a pocket novel with lots of fancy colours, etc., but it wasn’t very detailed or extensive as far as content went. I picked it up to see if there was anything on trains. There turned out to be an entire section on trains. It was divided into: Lionel, Marx, American Flyer, Tyco, Kits, Foreign Imports and Accessories. Each of these only took up a single page. Overall, I absolutely shocked at how awful it was! Here’s what each consisted of:
Lionel: An acceptable history, considering the length. However, it says that Lionel’s first train was made in 1902, not 1901. The train that they picked to show on that page was a cheap modern Safari set! Couldn’t they have gotten a picture of some better model to show?
Marx: The start and end years for Marx trains are both wrong. It states that Marx first began making trains in 1938. Marx acquired the Joy Line tooling from Girard Model Works in 1934 (they had marketed the trains since 1928) and that same year came out with their Commodore Vanderbilt 6-inch sets and M-10,000 sets. The book also says that when Quaker Oats bought out Marx in 1972, they stopped making trains. It’s true that changes occured at Marx with Quaker taking over, but train production continued until they went bankrupt in 1976. The train shown is a late 60’s/early 70’s clockwork train with a plastic 401 steamer, 6-inch UP tender coupled backwards and a 6-inch Seaboard gondola car.
American Flyer: The history is okay, but again there is a wrong year. It says that AF trains were last made in 1961. There’s also a major typo in a sidebar. It says that American Flyer was known for incompatibility with other brands, as before the war it came out with O gauge toy train when Lionel’s HO were more popular and then S gauge after the war, which other