K is for Kibri

This one's a bit of a box-ticker, compared to some of the others, and I've duplicated an image by scanning something already on the blog, but there you go, it's still quite interesting as Kibri (Kindler und Briel) have had three generations of figures.

Jon Attwood's loose sample is bigger than mine! But are they Kibri or Leyla, if you recall we looked at the Leyla issue here, and while they are always shown in the Kibri catalogues as fully painted, or fully decorated anyway, I don't know if that's how they were sold, as I've never seen the early Kibri packs/cards?

 

So they may well have just bought-in the Leyla figures wholesale? Or even. as the Leyla logo on those late cards is disguised as a station name-plate, just put a Kibri sticker over them? Or, did they obtain the Leyla intellectual property, upon the demise of Leyla?

 

This is from a Walther's catalogue, around the late 1990's I think, and shows what were shipped, or orderable from the 'States, via the Teminial Hobby Shop, being a B&W version of the old Kibri catalogue images.

While this is that Kibri catalogue imagery (the duplicate!), which I dealt with here a while ago, check the Kibri tag to find it and a very interesting petrol station! But it clearly shows two generations, the 'Leyla' sets, three seperate six-figure/item sets and one combining the first two, then three sets which look like the Roco, or Preiser sculpts, along with some animals, ditto - or even Merten for the animals?

More recently, the only animals in the catalogues have been these two sets of the same cows with different decoration. Having not handled them, I can't say much beyond that they are some kind of polymer and look like reasonable sculpts of modern dairy cattle.

 

The more recent Walther's (this one's the 2000 issue) show the final, third generation, which are the strange, slightly over-scale figures, which are more suited to the stylised models of architects or town-planners than a model railroad? Note also, more cow options, but I don't know the difference between the two B&W cow listings?

The 2000 Walther's N-gauge catalogue also has them, they must be so fiddly to glue-together, it could drive you to suicide, as heads smaller than pin's go flying across the workspace for the umpteenth time!

Jon's set, mine are browns rather than blue/yellow, and can be seen in both One Inch Warrior magazine and a more recent Plastic Warrior, which is lucky, if you subscribe . . . http://plasticwarrioreditor.blogspot.com/. The most interesting thing about them is it's one of only a few examples of over-moulding in small scale, with the heads moulded in one colour and then hats/hair moulded in a contrasting colour, pale-blue and yellow in the above sample.

 

There have been one or two other examples of over-moulding here, the Gem for Culpitt's experiment with footballers springs to mind, but there was another I think?

Also from Kibri catalogues, no figures sadly, although there are some in the studio shot, but lovely buildings for wargaming or role-play. I have three or maybe four of the five, in storage, and one day we'll get them out and have a proper look at them, but they are still mint/sealed, with their distinctive Kibri blue-ends.

 

Eko, from Spain, the great pirates of other-people's figures, lifted some of the sculpts for their civilian set, but whether they were pirating Leyla or Kibri remains lost in the mists of time - I suspect the former?