Lionel itself made some in the 70’s and 80’s and there have been a few articles (father and son set) in the past. A few articles on Varney, Tyco, Bachmann and Lifelike HO toy trains might be interesting. There were / are still HO Plasticville buildings and those are nothing if not toys. They have seen little coverage in comparison to the O/S sized ones.
I realize that most of the magazine is dedicated to the toys of the Baby Boomers but I am sure some of the slightly younger toy train enthusiasts here grew up with HO toy trains. Yes they were not O but you can’t look down on them too harshly because those were the toys our parents gave us. I remember fondly the mid-1980’s TV ads for the futuristic looking Tyco Turbo Trains that thanks to magnets raced up the wall AND glowed in the dark. I would love to see an article on these.
I would write one myself but I can’t think of a magazine that would accept it. They were toys so can’t fit into the HO scale model magazine (MR). At the same time they are not considered “classic” toy train size so it is hard to see the article getting into CTT. There is no “Classic HO Scale Toy Trains” magazine
The way I see it an expansion of the definition of "Toy trains " is a bit overdue. I am 30 and am a bit sad that the toys of my own youth seem that they will not be included in the toy train catagory. I know that there is a large group of people out there collecting “blue box Athern”. It seems that these people could fit in to the toy collecter catagory. The stories of these toys should be researched and told as well it seems to me. The older issues of CTT I have seem to have more research and fact based articles. I enjoy these a bit more than the layout tours be cause they are more timeless in terms of becoming a fact reference. Are there fewer fact based articles now? Is it because many of the stories have been told? An expansion of toy trains into HO would open a whole new set of
I think you have to look at the popularity of the items you mentioned in your first paragraph. A quick check of Ebay will tell you that’s not where the money is. Low demand, low prices. What you are talking about are “orphan” trains, that few want, or have been so heavily produced that they have little value.
Beside, HO has other magazines devoted to covering stories. I think most people would agree that Standard and S gauges are far more worthy of coverage, and CTT gives them little enough as it is.
Perhaps CTT needs to change it’s name to better reflect the market and editorial trends of the last 10 years. I think the problem is “O Gauge Railroading” is taken.[;)]
I imagine someone could write a decent article about the more “toy like” HO trains of the past, but getting it published would probably be a hard sell unless it really had some interesting and unusual twist that would attract the attention of a fairly substantial audience, not to mention the attention of an editor. I doubt there’s a whole lot of interest in HO “toy” trains since most folks see HO as an entirely separate–and well-documented–niche of its own.
As for “Classic Toy Trains” changing its name: That would be perhaps the worst move they could ever make. Yes, O gauge saw a spike in interest and sales over the past decade or so, but that spike definitely has peaked and now O gauge has, at best, leveled off, and at worst it is seeing a decline (and certainly a trend toward industry consolidation is under way). The advantage “Classic Toy Trains” has is that it can ride-out the peaks and valleys in any one segment of the hobby, and focus attention where needed to cover a much broader base than is possible with an O-only magazine. Best of all, it can attract a much broader advertiser base because it covers multiple scales, gauges, and interest areas.
I wouldn’t try to speak for the boss, but I’ve been in enough planning meetings to say “pretty unlikely” unless they have a tie to vintage Lionel/Flyer/Marx and even then, still unlikely.
There is an N scale collectors magazine, so perhaps someone will launch an HO collectors title, but I don’t think it will be Kalmbach.
You’ll note we haven’t covered modern Lionel HO or MTH HO to any extent, either.
Lionel’s early forays into OO and HO have been covered in the past with articles of an historical bent. I don’t recall any articles on the subject written as a repair guide.
I like CTT’s name as is. It allows for a broader scope of material and guages to be covered.
Outside of Lionel’s and Giblerts short-lived forays into HO, there is little that would be considered “classic toy trains” in that scale. Mantua/Tyco and AHM provided some sets of various quality in the 60s and 70s, then Model Power and LifeLike followed with some pretty sad stuff. None of it exactly classic or collectible to a broad audience. Most of the HO stuff that is out there is for operators rather than collectors (Athearn, Atlas, Kato, etc.) excluding brass stuff, of course. Model Railroader does a good job covering HO, as do several other hobby mags.
Maybe CTT could do an article on Lionel and/or Flyer HO, but there just isn’t much to cover on an on-going basis. Just my 2 cents.
First of all, I don’t think that HO trains such as Tyco, Bachmann and Life-Like really have a place in CTT. Articles about them wouldn’t be very well-received.
However, I do agree that there are some HO gauge (notice I said gauge and not scale) trains that definitely more than deserve to be covered in CTT.
One example that comes to mind is Tri-ang. Tri-ang trains, made in Great Britain during the postwar years, are collected in much the same way that postwar Lionel and American Flyer are. They didn’t just make British-prototype trains, but North American ones as well. While plenty of Tri-ang was sold in Canada, very little made its way to the US, however. There were also close ties between Tri-ang and Lionel. Tri-ang produced many items that Lionel did, including a giraffe car, log dump car, exploding boxcar and satellite- and helicopter-launching cars. I think that an article on these Lionel-influenced items certainly belongs in the pages of CTT. For those not familiar with Tri-ang, check out www.tri-ang.co.uk .
Also, over the years there were a variety of tinplate lithographed HO gauge toy trains made. One such example is the Bing Table Railway. This was the first complete line of HO/OO gauge trains ever manufacturered and was made entirely out of lithographed tin. Many of these trains were even clockwork. These are certainly “classic toy trains”.
There were also many tinplate HO gauge toy trains made in Germany and Japan by a variety of companies in the 50’s and 60’s. These were either clockwork or else battery-operated (either by placing a battery directly in the engine or in a control box that worked like a transformer). For some German examples, browse around www.spur00.de .
Of course, having said that, prewar and postwar tinplate toy trains from other countries in O and S gauge hardly get any coverage in CTT as it is. It would be very nice to see some more of that stuff! O
It’s hard enough for them to try to please all with toy toy train hi-rail toy trains, hybrids of those 2 styles, pre-war, post-war, MPC-era, modern era, not to mention S gauge, Standard Gauge and wind-up toys.
Agreed whole-heartedly! Real trains have a presense that HO and smaller trains utterly lack (and S barley manages), but O and larger trains begin to command. Trains are heavy, forceful, and imposing. O trains, especially die-cast steamers, simulate these qualities much better than anything in the more popualr, smaller scales. I’ll never forget the first time my 11-pound Frisco Mike literally pounded across my temporary layout making the pine-board-and-plywood-sandwich benchwork sag and rumble as it did so. No matter how well-detailed or faithful to the prototype an HO steamer might be, it cannot equal that experience for creating the atmosphere of a real steam engine.
Well I knew that this topic would not be universally popular but it has made an (at times) interesting conversation.
Sask_tinplater very interesting, I have never heard of this company I will try to look more into this. I have always felt that the Hornby toy OO catalogs are as interesting as Lionel ones in their creation of a tangible sence of imagination and possibility. The action accessories you mentioned from this other company seem really interesting. In my youth I remember having a Lifelike (very pre-proto2K) toy saw mill that had lever to pull to send logs through the mill and load and unload dump cars. It had as much action as most other accessories I’ve seen and was very fun to play with.
I still argue that there are valid toy HO trains worth looking at for anyone interested in toy trains. The only published area I can find that seems at all open to covering this type of toy is the Collectors Consist articles in RMC. They seem to cover every area of toy train collecting from cast iron floor toys on. While I don’t collect all of these types I do find the articles interesting. Toy trains are toy trains they are all interesting. The holistic approch taken in these colums is refreshing in this overly divided and compartmentalized hobby.
This is interesting. I wonder if there really might be an article reviewing some of the more obscure, for lack of a better word, ‘tinplate’ HO models. Or think 20 years in the future, will todays scale modellers be waxing nostalgic for the Tyco / Mantua models of their youth?
For us nostalgic Later Baby Boomers, and for those just getting into HO, would someone please tell me the names of any “other” periodicals that regularly include / feature HO?
Thanks for the support and understanding cnw1995. My point exactly.
While many, if not most model train magazines are about HO models they mostly feature current or recent production models. What I am trying to advocate for is a few articles on older models that are no longer in production that were originally intended as toys for children.
It seems to me that it is getting to the point soon that many train enthusiasts first model train was HO and not a larger size that traditionally has been associated with “toy trains”. In car collecting a car older than 25 years is considered an antique, would the same be true of a model? According to many articles I’ve read, three rail collectors in the 1970’s (and later in some cases) were dismissed as collectors of “worthless junk”. Now every non-hobbyist with three rail trains think they are worth a mint.
Hmm… interesting parallel. You would think that the hobby of train collecting having already been on the recieving end of this criticisim would easily see the same thing happening to younger collectors that will want focus on the trains of thier own youth.
Maybe in the box under the table at the train show the golden chromed plastic Tyco HO model lettered for the fantasy “Golden Eagle” will someday be worth more than the junk it is considered now. It would be nice to know the story behind it and any variations. The fantasy scheme (shades of American flyer deisels / Lionel Lines anyone ) seems an interesting way to avoid trademark issues. No U.P. grief here and it does seem much more toy like.
someone mentioned there were large numbers of folk collecting Athearn blue box HO trains. I remember a while back seeing a Athearn collecting group on Yahoo. Seems like it had about five members.
Rather than messing around with CTT, maybe Model Railroader is the mag that needs to expand its focus within the HO world if this is an issue worthy of more press.