Never had a ho set when I was young.I was fortunate to have Lionel and did have a Gilbert erector set. Wow, that was a great toy to develope imagination and dexterity. It was the set with the ferris wheel and I still have it.
Wonder if todays kids will be looking back and saying, I remember my old Galaxy s 6 [%-)]
Until I was a little older, the trains were only out from about Thanksgiving to New Year, so in between time, my favorite toys were my Erector set and een more so, Legos. And my other favorite ‘toy’ - a box full of wires, lights, and batteries that I would rig up. Little wonder I already knew what I wanted to study in college even before I got to high school. I also had nearly every flavor of those “150 in one” electronic kits from Radio Shack - the first one had each component on a little plastic block, with 4 spring terminals on each corner, There were plastic clips to hold the blocks together, and then little L shaped metal pieces to link the appropriate spring terminals together to build the circuit. All fun and creative toys, in between my voracious reading appetite. Little wonder I was able to figure out why the train stopped dead halfway around the layout one Saturday morning when my Dad was at work. I had it wired and running when he got home - I was about 5 or 6 at the time. Now days most of that creative spirit is buried under a mountain of video games. No one wants electronic experimenter kits, and I’d swear most of the Legos purchases thes days are by adults (I’m on of them). Erector sets have disappeared, and the days of taking apart discarded appliances is pretty much over as well (oh no, you might get hurt!). There’s a very good TED talk on that particular topic.
Look at the ads - the Marklin ones, and a few others - father and son working together on a layout, or the whole family. I don’t know how representative that was of the era, as 1958 is 8 years before i was even born. It’s the way we did things in our house. It seems sadly less and less representative as the years go on.
–Randy
I had an Erector set (mine had some sort of missle launch capability but I never used it for that; it had a big honking electric motor that I used to create all manner of toy situations). Legos were before my time but I had a similar set of white plastic bricks that I used with my toy soldiers – and a windup tank from Marx that could crash through that brick wall. I also like Lincoln Logs, which I think they still make – I remember the windmill parts in particular [EDITED POST: I might be thinking of Tinker Toys for the windmill] – and a set that some people might remember: the Kenner set which was an ingenious series of plastic steel beams that could snap together to create building outlines and roadways. It was advertised as being in HO scale. That was a neat and cleverly designed toy. You never built the same thing twice (unless you wanted to)
Dave Nelson
Scoot back to the end of the Jan 1958’s Fleischmann ad. You won’t see that in MR nowadays…
Don’t know if this helps, but the old Mantua coupler was sorta/kinda like the hook and loop couplers that “Large Scale” trains often come with now, particularly those made in Europe.
Ah yes, Lincoln logs, I had those, everything was wood except for the roof truss pieces, which were stepped to hold the flat green roof pieces.
Also Tinker Toys, I had those as well.
I had a building set similar to what you describe but I don’t remember it being advertised as HO scle, and I think it was actually smaller. At least, if the beams were supposed to represent standard steal I beams, they were definitely too short for HO.
And another I remember, the Mattel Spinwelders - there was this handheld tool which was basically a plastic case around a 6 volt motor, you connected it to a 6V lantern battery. There were these plastic bits, low melting point, that had a cop in one end that fit over the motor shaft. Each one came with plastic I beams and other parts designed to make a certain thing, the one I had mad a Can-Am race car. Pull the trigger, the motor would spin, and you touched the tip of the plastic to the spot you wanted to make a joine and it melted the plastic to form a weld - using plastic cement you could have built these things in an h
Dave!
I had one of those Kenner construction sets and I spent countless hours building things with it. Brings back some very fond memories. We had most of the other things that you and Randy mention but the bulk of them I inherited from my older brothers. The Kenner set was bought brand new just for me and I was thrilled to get it.
Dave
On the bottom of page 13 is a ad from Kurtz Kraft. I have heard the name before but am wondering what their story was? Can’t say I ever saw one of their products in person.
Kurtz Kraft is remembered (by some of us) for two things: they had the first prefab Code 70 flex track (but no turnouts) and they had a line of 40’ boxcar kits in plastic that featured separate ladders, separate grab irons etc. – all in plastic, and thus very much along the line of the Red Caboose/Intermountain/P2K lines of car kits, although the detail was not so fine. The sides, ends, floors, and roofs were all separate pieces and the cars came in a simple plastic bag stapled to a piece of paper, so at the hobby shop the cars hung on a hook. They did not come with trucks, and the couplers were simple dummy knuckle couplers, and the cars were very cheap – I had the Central of Georgia boxcar in the ad and I paid the list price of 89 cents! Even then that was cheap. What was unusual was that for the most part the car color was in the plastic, not painted, so the cars had a plastic sheen that had to be addressed. I have some vague recollection that ConCor picked up the line and included trucks. Years later the same cars were re issued by Cannonball.
If carefully assembled the cars looked good, but this was back in the “blob of airplane glue” era of plastic assembly and thus the cars were not valued as they should have been – The guys who could have done a careful craftsman like job with them were disdaining plastic totally, which was an unfortunate bias, and only a few real craftsmen were taking plastic seriously enough to do justice to Kurtz Kraft. Linn Westcott once wrote that the Kurtz Kraft line might actually have suffered because the packaging looked cheap and the prices were cheap and thus it was undervalued. &n
One thing caught my eye in the “Next Month In MR” announcement (p. 21) was for an article on making your own GP-9B using an Athearn shell as a starting point.
I’m glad I waited. Athearn will be releasing these this fall… only 57 years later!
Another interesting tidbit: The cartoon on page 62 portends the Penn-Central merger by ten years!
Ed
Ah yes, that’s what I was thinking I was forgetting when I made my original post and finally gave up trying to remember - the cartoon and the Penn Central! To be fair though, that and other northeast railroad mergers had been talked about as much as a year BEFORE the cartoon.
–Randy
You’re right, Randy. Seems like right after the war “merger fever” was taking place. Well, the war left a lot of railroads broke and equipment worn out.
I think Robert R. Young was pushing for a C&O-NYC merger. This was the time when railroad executives started moving from railroad to railroad (Perlman, Barriger come to mind) and the railroads more and more were led by Harvard Business School grads rather than old-line railroaders that came up through the ranks.
Ed
Another interesting “There is nothing new under the Sun” observation.
From the Ambroid ad.
“Newest of Ambroids famous “One of 5000 superdetailed HO kits. When these 5000 kits are gone, no more will be made, ever! Avoid disappointment, ask your dealer now for the Von Allmen Pickle Car by Ambroid. Make sure he reserves the next “1 of 5000” kit for you. Each one a collectors item!
Retail price $5.25. [^o)] Considering that in the Athearn ad directly above, “Tankers, variety roads and colors kits from 1.29, ready to run 2.49, and that the Hustler itself is only $4.95, I hope that the Ambroid cars were worth it.
Cheers, the Bear.
The Ambroid kits made for some nice cars, but they were not quicky kits by any stretch. Lots of work involved in making one. The “1 in 5000” thing got streteched a bit - some kits there were less than 5000 and others had way more than 5000. As is typical, the ones that didn’t sell 5000 back then are probably the ones people today would want. Just guessing, I’m not looking at any sort of chart that shows the model and production numbers, that info is likely out there though.
–Randy
Thanks for the info Randy, of course it made me more curious so with a little digging I found this site…
http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=railroadmodelweb;id=137;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.trainweb.org%2Fambroidkits%2Findex.htm
Cheers, the Bear.
This one has more info: http://www.trainweb.org/ambroidkits/trains/woodkits/Ambroid_5-Cars.htm
ANd since the one shown on the site you linked was the Matheison Dry Ice reefer, I ended up searching that and came up with the completely off topic site with some protoype info of the replacement - in the mid 30’s they stopped using generic reefers and built specialty cars for hauling dry ice. Which can be seen here: http://www.richyodermodels.com/mathieson_history.htm What I can’t imagine is doing like the 4th picture down, being INSIDE one of those cars loading and unloading it - being that dry ice is carbon dioxide and it surely would be sublimating into gas inside there, cutting the oxygen by a lot, those vents along the top edge or not.
–Randy