TOY TRAINS of YESTERYEAR: Covering early manufacturers, Photos of old toy trains

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ToyTrains of Yesteryearby Case Kowal This is a BRAND NEW BOOK – Not a used book. Book is sealed in shrink-wrap and mailed in a top-quality, durable container for protection. Book is a collection of articles reprinted from Toy Trains Magazine, covering early manufacturers, train sets and more. The early toy train makers: Lionel, Ives, American Flyer, Bing, Dorfan, Howard, Weeden, Knapp and others are featured from 1900-1939. Photos of rare old toy trains. The Trains of Yesteryear puts into one book many of the fascinating toy train collecting articles written by Case Kowal for Toy Trains Magazine during the early 1950s. The issues containing these articles have since been out of print and the rare back issues of Toy Trains command collectors' prices when they can be found. At the request of countless collectors, this 2 nd Edition has been produced.Toy train collecting has come a long way since the early 1950s, during which time the Train Collectors Association was organized (1954). Many items manufactured in the early 1950s and later have become sought after collectors items in themselves. Restoration, once looked down upon, became of age and is recognized as an important tool for the legitimate collector when properly done. Train meets are regularly held throughout North America.While all the articles in this book have been completely reset, the publisher has not changed the original articles in any way. They are reprinted just as they originally appeared insofar as the text is concerned and without apology. For greater reading pleasure we have redesigned the pages and added new illustrations. In 1906, Lionel introduced a new line of model trains that ran on track with a width (between rails) of 2.125 inches. In order to power the electric locomotives, the track included a third rail in the middle, which conveyed electricity. After coming up with a slogan that proclaimed “Lionel—Standard of the World,” Lionel named the design “Standard Gauge” and filed a trademark. Lionel derived the name from an incorrect interpretation of a gauge defined by the German toy company, Märklin. Whereas Lionel measured width between rails, Märklin measured the width from the center of one rail to the center of the other. In fact, this “standard” gauge was decidedly non-standard—European manufacturers had settled on two inches, as had Carlisle & Finch, the company that invented the toy train. The No. 1 gauge was much smaller, at 1.75 inches. But “standard” stuck and, more importantly, implied the sizes of other brands were, in fact, the strange ones. Regardless, Lionel’s standard gauge trains became exceedingly popular, especially in the 1920s, when the company’s care and attention to detail helped it dominate the market. Models like the super-realistic State-series passenger cars and the huge Shasta locomotive (the highly prized No. 381 E) thrilled kids—not to mention collectors today.But Lionel’s trademark didn’t prevent other companies from producing their own 2.125-inch trains, which they generally called “wide gauge” instead. American Flyer, Ives, and Dorfan all entered the market, often with success.Founded in 1924 by German immigrants Milton and Julius Forchheimer, Dorfan specialized in wide- and O-gauge trains. Whereas Lionel promoted itself as the standard, Dorfan pitched a slightly different angle—its trains, the company proclaimed, were easy to disassemble and reassemble. Accordingly, the company encouraged its young users to do just that as a way of learning about the trains’ design and inner-workings. Like Lionel, Dorfan also pushed for increasingly high levels of detail, including illustrations of passengers in their train windows. Like many other businesses of that era, Dorfan could not survive the Great Depression.Dorfan locomotives are highly valuable today because of the copper-zinc alloy the company used to manufacture them. This metal—now known as “Dorfan alloy”—was prone to impurities, which caused the locomotives to oxidize, expand, and crack. As a ... read more

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