Early history

Hornby, then known as Meccano Ltd and based in Liverpool, released its first train, a clockwork 0 gauge (1:48) model, in 1920. An electric train soon followed but was under-designed and the few that were made were sold out in France. In 1925 a much more successful electric model was introduced , operating on high voltage (220-240V) AC power. Safety concerns saw low voltage 4V and then 6V motors introduced, followed by a reliable 20V AC system, which was developed in the early 1930s. However, clockwork remained the mainstay of the Hornby 0 gauge trains until 1937, and became the only power available in Liverpool-made 0 gauge trains from 1949.

A factory was established in France, which developed its own range of French outline trains, but Liverpool dominated export activity elsewhere, with large numbers of Hornby trains exported to Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Scandinavia. Even though the export models were often painted in 'foreign' liveries, Hornby trains looked very British. Hornby attempted to break into the American market by setting up a factory in 1927 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to make American-style trains. These were colourful and attractive, but low market and only clockwork. They probably would have failed in the marketplace because several established U.S. firms could undercut them and Hornby offered no better-class goods or electric models, but the Wall Street Crash precipitated matters. In late 1929, Meccano Ltd. sold its New Jersey factory to the A. C. Gilbert Company, and Hornby trains had vanished from the U.S. market by 1930. The leftover inventory was sold in Canada and in the UK, and some of the tooling was reused for products in other markets.

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Overview

Bassett-Lowke was primarily a sale organisation, contracting out the manufacture of models and parts to other manufacturers, such as Twining Models, and Wintringham's also of Northampton. They did, however, keep the manufacture of ship models for display purposes in-house.

Bassett-Lowke produced trains in a variety of sizes, from 15-inch (380 mm) gauge live steam models to Gauge 2, Gauge 1, and 0 gauge.

Their first 15-inch gauge steam locomotive, test run on the Eaton Hall Railway in 1905 was Little Giant. Unlike other engines on the line it was a replica of main-line locos, being built for a new public miniature railway at Blackpool. It was a quarter scale 4-4-2 Atlantic tender engine, though not an exact copy of any particular prototype. This engine still exists in private ownership.

In 1914, Bassett-Lowke produced only the second Pacific 4-6-2 (of any size) to be built in Britain (the first was GWR 111 The Great Bear). This was the John Anthony, built for a private miniature railway at Staughton Manor. It was never delivered, but after storage at Eaton Hall during World War I, it was sold to the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway and renamed Colossus. It was scrapped in 1927. Previously the Ravenglass and Eskdale had purchased another Bassett Lowke Atlantic, the Sans Pareil.

In the 1920s, Bassett-Lowke introduced 00 gauge products as well. The company would also provide a complete custom-build railway service for those with necessary funds; one such layout survives in modified format at Bekonscot Model Village in England.

Bassett-Lowke's decline starting in the late 1950s can be blamed on at least two factors: Sometimes people would browse the firm's free catalogue and then buy similar or nearly identical items elsewhere at a lower price, but also consumer interest in technical toys in general began to decline in the late 1950s and even more so in the 1960s. Bassett-Lowke's fall was mirrored by two of its U.S. counterparts, the A. C. Gilbert Company and Lionel Corporation.

However, the 1960s were also to bring their problems, and in 1964 the company ceased its retail sales and sold its shops, including the famous one at High Holborn in London, to Beatties. The original Bassett-Lowke went out of business in 1965.

In 1966 the company was acquired by Messrs Riley and Derry, and in the late 1980s by Nigel Turner, a Northampton businessman.

In 1993 the name was revived for a while with short-run white metal models. These included a Burrell Type Traction Engine, Clayton Undertype Steam Wagon, Burrell Type Steam Roller, and London 'B' Type bus.

The brand name was in 1996 acquired by Corgi, which has now linked it with live steam 0 gauge locomotives.

Because of the premium nature of Bassett-Lowke's toys, they tended to be well preserved, and many examples survive today. They are highly collectible.

Key competitors to Bassett-Lowke were Hornby and Exley.

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The Marx logo was the letters "MAR" in a circle with a large X through it, resembling a railroad crossing sign. Because of this, Marx toys are sometimes misidentified as "Mar" toys.

Marx's toys included tinplate buildings, tin toys, toy soldiers, playsets, toy dinosaurs, mechanical toys, toy guns, action figures, dolls, dollhouses, toy cars, and HO scale and O scale toy trains. Marx's less-expensive toys were extremely common in dime stores, and its larger, costlier toys were staples for catalog retailers such as Sears and Montgomery Ward, especially around Christmas. Although the company is now largely forgotten except by toy collectors, several of its toys remain well known. Rock'em Sock'em Robots, introduced in the 1960s, remained popular for years and has been reintroduced by several different companies. Its last hurrah was the Big Wheel ride-on pedal toy, which was introduced in 1969 and became one of the most popular toys of the 1970s.

Founded in 1919 in New York City by Louis Marx and his brother David Marx, the company's basic policies were "Give the customer more toy for less money," and "Quality is not negotiable," which made the company highly successful. Initially the company had no product designs and no manufacturing capacity, so Marx raised money by positioning itself as a middle man, studying available products, finding ways to make them cheaper, and then closing a sale. Funds raised from these effort proved sufficient to purchase tooling for two obsolete tin toys—called the Alabama Minstrel Dancer and Zippo the Climbing Monkey—from toymaker Ferdinand Strauss, one of Louis Marx's former employers. With subtle changes, Marx was able to turn these toys into hits, selling more than 8 million of each within two years. Marx then bought the company it had subcontracted to manufacture the toys. By 1922, both Louis and David Marx were millionaires. Initially Marx produced few original toys, but was able to predict what toys would be hits and manufacture them less expensively than the competition. The yo-yo is an example: Although Marx is sometimes wrongly credited with inventing the toy, Marx was quick to market its own version, and during the 1920s sold an estimated 100 million of them.
An O Scale Marx train set made in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
An O Scale Marx train set made in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Unlike most companies, Marx's revenues grew during the Great Depression. By 1937, the company had more than $3.2 million in assets ($42.6 Mil. in 2005 dollars), with debt of just over $500,000. Marx was the largest toy manufacturer in the world by the 1950s. In a 1955 article, Time Magazine proclaimed Louis Marx "the Toy King," and that year, the company had about $50 million in sales. Marx was the initial inductee in the Toy Hall of Fame, and his plaque proclaimed him "The Henry Ford of the toy industry."

At its peak, Louis Marx and Company operated three manufacturing plants in the United States: Erie, Pennsylvania, Girard, Pennsylvania, and Glen Dale, West Virginia. The Erie plant was the oldest and largest, while the Girard plant, acquired in 1934 with the purchase of Girard Model Works, produced toy trains, and the Glen Dale plant produced toy cars. Additionally, Marx operated numerous plants overseas.

In the 1960s Marx capitalized on the space toy and robot craze. It produced the Big Loo "Your friend from the Moon" in 1964 and originated the popular Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.
"Donald the Demon" figurine
"Donald the Demon" figurine

In 1963, they began making a series of plastic figurines called the Nutty Mads which included some almost psychedelic creations such as Donald the Demon: a half duck half madman, driving a miniature car.

The Company slowly lost it's preeminence from the 1950s on, perhaps due to not aggressively advertising on television as its rivals did. In 1955, with sales of US$50 million, Marx only spent $312.00 on advertising for the entire year. By contrast, Mattel Toys in the same year had sales of $6 Million but spent $500,000 for advertising, sponsoring shows like The Mickey Mouse Club.

In 1972, Marx sold his company to the Quaker Oats Company for $54 million ($246 Mil. in 2005 dollars) and retired at the age of 76. Quaker owned the Fisher-Price brand, but struggled with Marx. Quaker had hoped Marx and Fisher-Price would have synergy, but the companies' sales patterns were too different. Marx has also been faulted for largely ignoring the trend towards electronic toys in the early 1970s. In late 1975, Quaker closed the plants in Erie and Girard, and in early 1976, Quaker sold its struggling Marx division to the British conglomerate Dunbee-Combex-Marx, who had bought the former Marx UK subsidiary in 1967.

A downturn in the British economy in conjunction with high interest rates caused Dunbee-Combex-Marx to struggle, and these unfavorable market conditions caused a number of British toy manufacturers, including Dunbee-Combex-Marx, to collapse. By 1978 the Marx brand disappeared, and Dunbee-Combex-Marx filed for bankruptcy and was liquidated in 1980. The Marx assets were then liquidated, with many of the patents and molds going to Mego Corporation, another famous maker of dime store toys, and a large number of them going to Canadian toy maker Aurora.

The rights to some of Marx's toys are now owned by other companies, and some of its former products are still in production. Marx Toys, Inc., was sold and transformed into 'Marx Toys & Entertainment, Inc.' Marx Trains, Inc. produces lithographed tin trains, both of original design and based on former Louis Marx designs. K-Line produced plastic O scale train cars and scenery using former Marx molds, which are now marketed under the 'K-Line by Lionel' brand name. Model Power produces HO scale trains from old Marx molds. Rights to the original Marx Big Wheel, an all plastic three wheeled tricycle for kids, are owned by KidsWheels, Inc. and still sold in the U.S., and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots is claimed by Mattel. Marx's toy soldiers and other plastic figures are in production today in China for the North American market and are mostly targeted at collectors, although they sometimes appear on the general consumer market, particularly at dollar stores.

The Marx name itself has changed hands several times as well. Despite the similar names, neither of the Marx-branded companies of today have any connection to the original Louis Marx and Company.

The original Marx toys are highly regarded by collectors.

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Early steam locomotives normally traveled forwards only; although reverse operations capabilities were soon built into locomotive mechanisms, the controls were normally optimized for forward travel, and the locomotives often could not operate as well in reverse. Some passenger cars, such as observation cars, were also designed as late as the 1960s for operations in a particular direction. A turntable allowed a locomotive or other rolling stock to be turned around for the return journey.

Most modern diesel and electric locomotives can run equally well in either direction, and many have control cabs at each end. In addition, railroads often use multiple locomotives to pull trains, and even with locomotives that have distinct front and rear ends, the engines at opposing ends of a locomotive "consist" (a group of locomotives coupled together and controlled as a single unit) can be aligned so they face opposite directions. With such a setup, trains needing to reverse direction can use a technique known as a "run around," in which the engines are uncoupled from the train, pull around it on an adjacent track or siding, and reattach at the other end. The engineer changes operating ends from the original locomotive to the one on the opposite end of the locomotive consist.

Railroad terminals also use features such as balloon loops and wyes to reverse the orientation of railroad equipment. Because of the advent of these practices, modern roundhouses are frequently not round and are simply large buildings used for servicing locomotives. Like much other railroad terminology, however, the structure has retained its traditional name. The alternative term engine-house encompasses both semi-circular and rectangular structures and broadly describes all buildings intended for storage and servicing of locomotives. Shops or workshops are buildings containing hoists and heavy machinery capable of major repairs beyond routine servicing. Some roundhouses include shop facilities internally or in adjoining buildings.

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Although Märklin is best known for its trains, from 1914 to 1999, the company produced mechanical construction sets similar to Meccano and Erector. Between 1967 and 1982, the company produced a slotcar system called Märklin Sprint. Märklin also produced numerous other toys over the years, including lithographed tinplate toy automobiles and boats.

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On 11th May 2006, the company, which had until then been owned by the three families Märklin, Friz and Safft, was sold to the British investment group Kingsbridge Capital, with the support of the employees. The new shareholders plan to restructure the company and make it profitable again. The purchase price was approximately $38 million. At the time, Märklin had approximately $70.5 million in debt, as a result of several years of slumping sales.

In 2007, the company expanded its product offering by buying the remaining assets of the bankrupt firm, Ernst Paul Lehmann Patentwerk, who owned the LGB brand and product line of G scale model railways.

History

Mantua Metal Products was a Woodbury Heights, New Jersey, metalworks business founded in 1926 by John Tyler and family. In the 1930s Mantua began to manufacture HO scale model trains of die-cast metal, and became a leading hobbyist brand. In the 1950s Mantua pioneered "ready-to-run" HO-scale model railroad kits under the TYCO (for Tyler Company) brand. Many TYCO and Mantua die-cast products, such as steam engines, are collector's items today.

In the 1960s, TYCO changed its focus from train kits to ready-to-run trains sold in hobby shops and also added HO-scale electric racing, or "slot car" sets. By the 1970s, TYCO shifted sales and marketing to a consumer-oriented, mass marketing focus. Eventually the name changed to TYCO Industries, under which name the company was sold in 1970 to Consolidated Foods during an era of corporate conglomerates. As a division of what became the Sara Lee Corporation, Tyco continued to grow

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The terms scale and gauge are often erroneously confused, but there is an important difference. Scale means the ratio between a unit of measurement on a model compared with a unit of measurement in corresponding full size prototype, while gauge is the distance between the two running rails of the track. About 60% of the world's railways have a track gauge of 4 ft 8½ in (1,435 mm) known as "standard gauge", but there are also narrow gauge railways where the track gauge is less than standard and broad gauge railways where the gauge is wider. In a similar manner, a scale model railway may have several track gauges in one scale.

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Most hobbyist who build models of buildings do so as part of a diorama to enhance their other models such as a model railroad or model war machines. As a stand-alone hobby, building models are probably most popular among enthusiasts of construction toys such as Erector, Lego and K'nex. Famous landmarks such as the Empire State Building, Big Ben and the White House are common subjects. Standard scales have not emerged in this hobby. Model railroaders use railroad scales for their buildings: HO scale (1:87), N scale (1:160), and O scale (1:43). Lego builders use miniland scale (1:20) and minifig scale (1:48) and micro scale (1:192) Generally, the larger the building, the smaller the scale. Model buildings are made from plastic, foam, balsa wood or paper. Card models are published in the form of a book, and some models are manufactured like 3-D puzzles. Professionally, building models are used by architects and salesmen..

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