T is for Toy Town

So, failed AC/DC adaptor - and other things - have kept me away for a couple of weeks, back now, but won't post much over Christmas. Lucky I got that PW review out when I did as a new one turned-up a few days later! Also some reader contributive input (could I possibly have written that more highfalutin!) to come, for the MG post below this.

A quick look at a carded set Gareth sent my way the other day...

These are Hong Kong in origin, but are so architecturally German/NW European, I assume copies of something from Manurba or a similar producer, and I may have some better ones marked W.Germany in storage? Trying to replace the timeless wooden ones, they failed and while they were around for a bit in the late 1960-mid 1970's, they have disappeared now.

A little scenario, well you can't call it a 'diorama'; I forgot the scatter material, the baking-soda snow, the twisted wire trees and the Tiger tank having an engine-change! It's Christmas!

Comparison between the wooden design still going to this day and the plastic pretenders, plastic was not a brilliant material for what are essentially infant toys, and especially hard, brittle polystyrene, the wooden ones take a lot of punishment and don't cut your gums if you chew them!

There are two designs (front and back shown) and these are typical of the blocks of flats built all over Germany between and after the last war, and the lower design is very similar to the barrack-blocks we had in Berlin, although our blocks had two entrances and longer wings. The flat Dad lived in in Neuhausen-ob-Eck was very similar to the upper design, but with separate balconies.

These building also have long corridor basements in real life, with external exits via stars at one or both ends - unless they are side-by-side as town houses, in which case the access is via the central stair-case.